Laughing Wolfman or Mummy? – Photo: L. Weikel

You Decide

Ah, there’s nothing like the first days of spring, when every day is a joyful reminder that life does exist outside of four walls. (It doesn’t matter what four walls you’ve been looking at, either. Or even if you have the luxury of being cooped up within a plethora of walls. The point is escaping walls altogether.) This is when our longer trek, the four mile walk-about, calls to us like a siren. Today’s walk, though, yielded a special treat – but you decide what it is:

Is it a smiling Wolfman? Or is it a mummy?

Just look at the photo above! My vote is that it’s a smiling Wolfman. The material’s coloring makes it look like there’s fur all over the face. It’s a simple identification – but clearly Wolfy.

Karl, of course, maintains that it looks much more like a common mummy. I maintain mummy’s wraps are almost always more of a white-ish color, unless, of course, they’re wrapping a wound that wept some sort of fluid. Then they’re usually white or off-white with darker or sometimes bloodied splotches.

The Truth

The truth, of course, is that this little bundle we discovered at the edge of a road that’s rarely used and a forest, is actually either an owl or a hawk pellet. These lovely little discoveries are the detritus a raptor yarps* up after a meal that yields stuff that no creature can extract sustenance from: fur, skeletons, claws, and teeth, for instance. It’s a wonder how these birds have gullets that do the fancy separating, taking the nutrition ‘in’ and letting the stuff that could hurt them go back ‘out’ the same way it came in.

I’ll be honest. I poked it with a stick after photographing it to see if I could find any bones. I’ve read about how fully intact skeletons can be found in some pellets, which I would love to discover. (Oddly, but rather efficiently, there’s a cottage industry that’s developed harvesting these pellets!)

No such luck this time. But it did make me question whether this was an owl pellet or a hawk pellet. Apparently hawks tend to yarp up pellets that contain mostly fur and feathers. They’re much more fastidious about picking bones clean of their prey, while owls just swallow the whole thing and let their innards do the work of separating.

I learn something new every day!

My poking yielded no discernible bones, so my semi-scientific conclusion is that our discovery was probably a hawk pellet. But I still think it looks like the face of a laughing Wolfman!

P.S.: *I’m pretty sure I first learned the word yarp used as a verb to describe what birds of prey do when they orally expel the undigestible pieces of their prey from the set of youth-oriented books, Guardians of Ga’Hoole.**

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