Diet of Tyto furcata in the Pampa region

Tyto furcata is the only species from the Tytonidae family in Brazil. It is a widely distributed owl that successfully occupies a great variety of environments. Part of this success can be explained by its ecological plasticity and to its diet based on the consumption of small mammals, including birds, insects, amphibians and reptiles. In order to understand better the food habits of the T. furcata species in the Pampa biome, the present study aims to identify the prey that are part of this owl’s diet. The study was based on the analysis of 40 pellets collected in the city of Santa Margarida do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, during the austral summer of 2017. Prey items were identified through hard remains such as skulls, bones, beaks and fragments of exoskeleton, comparing these structures to a reference collection. Rodents were the predominant items in the diet, present in 97.5% of the samples, followed by insects present in 87.5%. However, insects were representative in term of biomass in just 20.0% (n=8). Only two other vertebrate groups were found, both of them in only two samples each: birds and bats of the Phylostomidae family. The most frequent species in the diet was Calomys laucha, a small rodent of about 20g that is difficult to detect in the environment by other methods of study. The present study contributes to understanding of local biodiversity, and provides more information about this species in a still poorly studied biome.