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The analysis of owl pellets contents has long been used for inventorying small mammal communities and constitutes an important complementary method in addition to traditional surveys, because owls prey also on rare species or those with specific microhabitat requirements or behavioural traits, thus sometimes recording taxa that would have gone unnoticed with standard survey techniques (Martin 2005; Teta et al. 2006). Small mammals remains from Barn Owl pellets have also been extensively used in analyses of small mammals distribution throughout geographical gradients (Massoia et al. 1999; Torre et al. 2004). In Brazil, several studies have used this technique, but with one exception (Roda 2006), they were all conducted in southern, southeastern and central Brazil (e.g. MottaJunior 1996; Bonvicino and Bezerra 2003). The Atlantic Forest portion located north of the Sao Francisco River is considered an important centre of endemism in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest – the Pernambuco Endemism Centre (Costa et al. 2000; Silva and Castelletti 2003) and recent estimates indicate it has less than 12% of its original forest cover, composed mostly by small and