Meet The Dog That’s Learning How to Help Save An Endangered Owl
An owl pellet, also known by falconers as a casting, is similar to a hairball coughed up by a cat, except an owl pellet contains the undigestible remains of the owl’s most recent meal, including insect exoskeletons, bones, fur, feathers, bills, claws and teeth. Owl pellets are popular items to dissect in science classes and are important to ornithologists for tracking seasonal variations in an owl’s eating habits as well as locating roosts and nest sites. Pellets are not easy to spot in the leaf litter and undergrowth, but a dog can sniff them out easily. By training a dog — a border collie-springer spaniel cross named Zorro in this case — to locate pellets produced only by the Tasmanian masked owl, the Difficult Birds Research Group plans to use them as a method to survey and to study these elusive nocturnal birds.
“Masked owls are very hard to find using ordinary survey techniques, and in remote, rugged Tasmanian forests, trudging around at night looking for owls is both unsafe and inefficient, so we had to get creative and find a new solution,” said conservation biologist, Dejan Stojanovic, who specializes in conservation and management of threatened species and their habitat, and who leads this project. It was his PhD research that led to the discovery that introduced sugar gliders are voracious predators on the critically endangered swift parrot (