When I was doing working on my Early Childhood Education diploma, I did a placement with school age children. It ended up being at a daycare during summer holidays. The coordinator had purchased some owl pellets online for the children to dissect.
I had never seen one before and didn’t even realize they were a thing. A few of the older girls were keen on the idea so a few of us spent a good hour with tweezers and skewers poking and prodding at the tightly packed pellets.
Owls eat their prey and then regurgitate the bones and hair in a tight mass. Check out this website for more information if interested https://www.barnowltrust.org.uk/owl-facts-for-kids/owl-pellets/.
Just after Covid started, my brother Russell had posted that they had an owl in the area where they always walked. I asked him to see if there were any grey masses below the tree where the owls were nesting. Sure enough, he found some of the pellets. I was hoping to use them at work during summer camp so he graciously mailed them to me.
Shortly after they arrived I wrapped each in foil (wearing gloves of course) and cooked them in the oven at 325° for 30 min to kill off any living organisms still in them. Truthfully, my kitchen smelled like roasted chicken.
Covid continued its rampage and I ended up not going back to work for summer camp. I put the foil wrapped owl pellets in a shoe box and stored them in the garage.
Fast forward to present day. I came across the pellets when we moved all our stuff a few weeks ago. I decided it would be a great activity to share with my nieces when they were visiting.
They spent this past weekend at our place camping in their trailer. On Saturday we donned some gloves, tweezers and a couple long nails and began opening the pellets.
Each pellet dried is about 2” and oval in shape. There is a lot of matted hair/fur/feathers depending on what the owl ate. In amongst the fur are tiny bones and skulls.
We had gone through about 15 pellets and were finding similar sized bones and mini skulls. I asked if we should keep going and open them all or just be done. My niece said, ”What if we don’t open anymore and the next one has something really cool. We’d better keep going.”
The very next one we opened had the top of a skull the size of the whole pellet; a skull of a small rodent that did not break. We let out an excited ”Woah!”, and set about cleaning it off.
Here is the selection of bones we found in about twenty pellets.
We will see if we can clean them off a bit better after a good soaking.
My nieces think that they deserve a proper burial in the near future after being eaten, digested and puked up by an owl.
I love doing hands on science related activities with kids.
They tend to be more interested than most adults.
A lot of adults are pretty squeamish when it comes to anything related to mice, snakes, spiders or worms. I just find all of it fascinating.
If you have the opportunity to search through some owl pellets, I highly recommend it. You never know what treasures you’ll find.
Amazing – I would never have thought to look. I’m sure you and your nieces had lots of fun.