Matthew, we are making a educational pellet dissection video and in our experiences we have found no bones of voles in our pellets.
We understand that the stomach acids within the Kestrels is very strong and dissolves the bones.
There may be fragments of arthropod bits and lizard scales depending on the area. Prey common in our area are voles, beetles and grubs with the odd small bird and maybe the od frog.
We will be including photos from or digital microscope in this video.
We would appreciate your knowledge on this matter and anything else you can provide.
Thank you very much,
Nu-Sun Cinema American Kestrel Research Center
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.
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Hi Rick -
We appreciate you reaching out, but to be perfectly honest with you, this subject is largely outside of our purview. Our data collection focuses on breeding presence and success, and because of this our research skews heavily towards broad-scale analysis of kestrel demographics. As a result, we don't really have any information we can offer about diet, and specifically pellets, other than the general information that's already posted on our website.
If you have any specific questions, we'll do our best to answer them, but if any of our partners have done research in this area they are almost assuredly able to speak knowledgeably on this subject than we can. Again, we apologize that we can't help more.
Matthew
AKP Staff