Project Results
Project Photo Highlights
Offal Wildlife Watching by the numbers
first year of image collection
hunters who have deployed cameras throughout Minnesota since project inception
gut piles filmed since project inception
different species captured on camera visiting project gut piles
images collected since 2018
Zooniverse volunteers who have helped identify and classify project images
Offal as Hunting Grounds
One of the best aspects of participatory science is that volunteers can observe and suggest things that are going on at gut piles that researchers might miss. One hunter volunteer suggested that there is more going on than just scavenging. Barred owls, for example, are recorded on many of the gut pile images. We know they are feeding on the guts themselves because we see this in several images. What’s interesting, however, is what might be attracting owls to this food resource. Owls detect their prey through sight and sound. Since gut piles aren’t moving or making noise, what is attracting owls to the gut piles? The volunteer suggested that perhaps they were hunting other scavengers. And lo and behold, we see this in some images!
The question now is: are owls hunting rodents and getting a free meal of guts after, or do they find the gut pile and opportunistically use it to hunt rodents? We don’t just see this in owls, we have also recorded bobcats playing with captured rodents.
patterns of rodent and barred owl detections at gut piles throughout the day from OWW participant cameras.
Dominant Wildlife at Offal in Minnesota Biomes
The graph below shows the proportion of images (not individuals within the images) in each biome that recorded a certain species group from 2018-2021. Each bar represents a different species grouping. Unsurprisingly, birds dominate most of the images we see. However, in the prairie, we see more carnivore images. Since the prairie region is pretty open, we expected birds to see gut piles quickly and dominate them, often before carnivores can even smell them, but the data shows carnivores are finding them quickly.
