Do crows cast pellets like hawks and owls?
Most birds that eat indigestible foods produce pellets. I know for a fact that crows and jays (at least Blue and Florida Scrub-) produce pellets, and I am certain that most other insectivorous birds do as well. I’m not sure why all we know about are owl pellets. Perhaps it’s because they roost in recognizable spots and produce large, cohesive pellets with lots of hair to hold them together. If anyone would bother to look under a crow roost they would find hundreds of small lumps of grain and gravel that represent the crows’ pellets. Not having much hair in them, they fall apart quickly and might be overlooked if you didn’t know what to look for. In the winter of 1996-97 I was exploring under a medium to large crow roost in central Ohio (somewhere between 14,000-50,000) and was surprised at the amount of gravel that was moved. Take about 5 small stones (each about 2 mm in diameter), figure a pellet every other day over the course of 5 months, and multiply by 50,000, and you come up with
