Kellie Suelter

Across the midwest, species throughout the animal kingdom benefit from gut piles (also known as offal) that are left when hunters field-dress deer they kill. These gut piles are rich in nutrient-dense organs, such as intestines, stomach, and lungs, that humans rarely eat. Roughly 200,000 deer are killed every year in Minnesota making the presence of this offal a pulsed resource, or a resource that occurs in a large volume over a short period of time annually. In this project, volunteer hunters positioned trail cameras on gut piles and left them for 30 days. The images were then reviewed by participatory scientists on Zooniverse. Using these data, we aimed to determine if there was a hierarchy of avian groups that visited these gut piles. We hypothesized that Corvids such as crows and Raptors would arrive at the offal piles first. Using a Kruskal Wallace test of variance, we found a slight statistical difference between Corvid and Raptor arrival times, while Picidae and Passerines had no statistical difference. This information may be helpful when determining what species might be more susceptible to lead poisoning if lead-based ammunition was used to kill the hunted deer.