Feathers
My favorite tracking story from my most recent visit to New Mexico: I saw these feathers from quite a ways off because they were fluttering in the breeze and the movement caught my eye. I followed a trail of feathers from the first two I saw and determined that this bird had been preyed upon.
I was intrigued because I couldn’t immediately identify them. Most feathers of this size that I find at a kill site belong to wild turkeys, but the color patterns are wrong for turkey feathers. I was trying to gauge whether or not they could be some kind of grouse when I noticed the soft fringe on the edge. You can see it best in the close-up photo of the feather. That fringe narrowed down the possibilities a lot — these are owl feathers!
Once I knew they were owl feathers, the color pattern immediately made me think barn owl. I have since confirmed that identification with people more knowledgeable than I. These are definitely barn owl feathers.
The feathers appear to have been plucked, not broken, which makes me think the predator was a bird rather than a mammal. There aren’t a lot of raptors that would take a barn owl. The most likely possibilities in the area were bald eagles and great horned owls. Given the habitat, my best guess was great horned owl.
There was no way to confirm my guess (and there still isn’t), but about ten minutes after I continued down the trail I spotted the animal in the final photo. It was about 100 yards away and in silhouette, so at first I thought it might be a bobcat or a gray fox sitting in the tree. The photo is very heavily cropped and doesn’t even begin to meet my photography standards, but it did allow me to identify the subject: that’s a great horned owl!
Like I said, I can’t know for sure that a great horned owl preyed on the barn owl, and even if I could, I couldn’t know that this particular great horned owl was the predator in question. Nevertheless, it was *very* cool to run into him/her at that moment!
