Mysterious Pellets

Lots of things in nature are mysteries waiting to be solved.  And each time I encounter something mysterious, it leaves me in awe of nature and aware of how much I do not yet know.

So this winter, for the first time, I saw something mysterious underneath my birdfeeders..a mystery that I hope the readers of this blog will help me to solve.

Under the feeders are small, about one inch long, pellets composed almost entirely of the hulls of sunflower seeds (the food in the feeders).

It seems likely that something that visits the feeder left these behind. But what?  We have lots of visitors, but I thought only raptors made pellets.  Could other birds?  Could mammals?

I had read that crows, blackbirds and pigeons could also produce pellets.  We do have flocks of blackbirds, but they do not come every day.  These pellets are deposited with great regularity.  At first I thought it might be the morning doves that we see, but they are usually not under this feeder--the closest one to the house.

So I googled "regurgitated sunflower seed pellets" to see if I could find the answer there.  There were a couple of blogs that mentioned strange pellets.

One blogger ended up trapping a chipmunk and saw the pellets in the cage with the chipmunk. But we don't have any chipmunks in our woods.  At least that solves the mystery of "could mammals produce pellets of regurgitated food".

Another blog called the pellets "possum pellets" and has observed young possums at the feeders.  I certainly have plenty of possum in my woods, and they are great scavengers.  So this may be the "culprit".

The gaiagarden.blogspot.com post had a better picture that looks identical to the situation at my feeder:

So, while possums are a good bet in my situation, I was still not totally convinced. After consulting my mammal books (Wild Mammals of Missouri  by Schwartz and Schwartz and Mammals of Illinois by Hoffmeister), I found neither mentioned sunflower seeds in the diet of opossum or this ability to form pellets.  Perhaps it is a big omission.  It is noted that possums are scavengers and eat corn, a less preferred food, in winter when other foods are not available.  It would seem to me that sunflower seeds would also fall into this category. 

What do you think?  Is it an opossum leaving the pellets...or something else??

Change in a Day: Winter Woods

 thought about this project after seeing a video of a year in the forest.  The small changes with many images documenting those changes made an impression.  So I set out to do the same.

I set my camera in the window facing east to capture the sunrise.  I was going to get the sunrise every day for a year.  But then I looked out about 30 minutes later and noticed the change.  I snapped another picture.  I did this throughout the day from the same spot noticing changes in light, shadow, etc.

At the end of the day, I dumped the pictures into a power point.

But I also wanted to add music, so I thought of Photo Story.  I hadn't used the program in a year or so, but I knew it was easy to add pictures and music, so I gave it a try.  I was so pleased with the result that I posted it on my other blog: nature-bits-and-bytes on Thurs, Jan 16, 2014 entitled A Day in the Woods.  See what you think.