What Kinds of Organisms Do Owls Eat?

Types

• Owls hunt small mammals by swooping down on them from a tall perch and killing them with a strike from their extremely sharp talons. The larger the owl is, the larger the prey that it can handle. For example, larger owls can bring down prey the size of rabbits, woodchucks, and opossums, while smaller owls need to content themselves with mice, rats, and bats. Owls will also eat birds, fish, reptiles amphibians and insects,

Specializations

• While most owls will eat any animal that is small enough for it to kill, some owls specialize in certain types of prey. For example, African fishing owls and Asian fish owls are specialize in fish and other aquatic prey. Barn owls tend to eat mice, voles and shrews, while scops owls and screech owls, which are very small, eat primarily insects.

Cannibalism

• Owls are opportunistic predators and they will certainly devour smaller owls that they find. In cases where a chick is weak or dying, the mother might kill it and eat it herself or feed it to the other chicks. Owl chicks are also fairly gregarious and will keep each other warm while the mother is gone. However, when food is scarce or when one sibling is bigger than the other, the larger sibling may devour the younger one.

Method

• Identifying what a certain owl or species of owls eats is a matter of investigating the owl pellets. Owls swallow all of their prey's body and then they regurgitate the indigestible parts in the form of compact pellets. These pellets contain the hair and bone of their prey, and when the pellets are digested, they reveal what the owl has been eating.