Pretty much every day on my walk, I see evidence of ruin: businesses that are out of business thanks to the pandemic. The fancy nut and chocolate shop on Charles Street. The tea store on Washington. I pass vacant store fronts, restaurants shut tight, and, if there are no tell-tale signs, I try to remember what was in there just six months ago.
While some businesses are booming - think telehealth tech, think Zoom, think all those Etsy crafters sewing up face masks - many operations are shit out of business. And some of these are not that obvious. Mostly because you wouldn't have imagined there was such a business to begin with.
One such business: owl pellet sales.
Owl pellets, you may well be asking yourself?
Yes, indeedy. Owl pellets.
When I first read the term, when it came to owl pellets, I didn't even know which end was up. But as it turns out, owl pellets aren't like rabbit pellets. They're puked up, and here's what that's all about:
Somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, a barn owl has just eaten a mouse.I'm quite sure that if I were to eat a mouse, I'd be vomiting it up, too. But perhaps not so intact. So props to the owls out there.
Twelve hours from now, give or take, it will regurgitate a compact mass of fur and bones known as an owl pellet. The pellet will contain a near-perfect skeleton of the devoured rodent and a treasure trove of data for researchers, providing insights on the owl, its prey and the environment in which it lives. (Source: WaPo)
Grade-school teachers use them to teach basic biological concepts. College students might be assigned to reassemble entire skeletons. Scientists use them to track prey animal populations and monitor pollutant levels.Then there's witchcraft rituals.
And jewelry:
On Etsy, for instance, there are numerous vendors who make earrings, pendants and other trinkets from the tiny bones contained in the pellets.Next time I'm face mask-hunting on Etsy, I'll have to look around for tiny bone trinkets...
Anyway, there is a small but up now vibrant owl pellet industry in the U.S. - "at least" 6 companies selling millions of owl pellets each year - not to mention a cadre of hunter-gatherers who make up the first node in the owl pellet supply chain. At the other end, there are pellet retailers. At least one, anyway. And that one promotes deploying pellets as "an ethical way to teach science." No frog, no fetal pig was killed and dipped in formaldehyde in the making of this experiment.
We didn't have much by way of science in grammar school. It just wasn't a parochial school thing. The only science instruction I recall was in 7th and 8th grade, where one period a week was devoted to reading chapters in a text book that was used, on full repeat, both years. Mostly, we sat there looking at the page on the reproductive organs which had an illustration of a uterus but nothing - unless I've repressed the memory - that showed the boy thang.
But in high school bio, we dissected a frog. I remember snipping the spinal cord, and identifying ovaries. (Thanks to that 7th grade science learning!) We buried our frogs under a tree on the edge of school property. This was not a sanctioned activity, so I don't know how we got away with it. Maybe Sister Maura didn't want to dispose of all those dissected frog bodies. Sacrilegeously, we sang "Froghead Here in Hiding" to the tune of the hymn "Godhead Here in Hiding."
In college, I didn't take any lab science, but fast forward a few years and my husband and I got to witness the autopsy of a baby elephant at the San Diego Zoo.
No experience whatsoever with owl pellets, I'm afraid.
And now, with so many schools going virtual, the demand for owl pellets has plummeted. Schools aren't ordering, and the number of parents ordering pellets for home schooling, while on the increase, isn't making up for the shortfall in school orders.
I'm guessing that for every shop and restaurant that's been cold-cocked by COVID, there's a quirky little industry like owl pellets.
Where's it all going to end?
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