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Kid scientists dissect owl pellets
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Posted on Nov 02 2004
By mariah untalan and Estelle Brown
Our class dissected owl pellets, an owl’s puke. Owls eat thousands of rats per year, and you can learn exactly what they are eating by dissecting the pellets, which are found near the owl’s nest. The pellets are formed in the gizzard of an owl. The owl regurgitates the bones, fur and feather of rodents and birds in a “pellet” around their nest. Our teacher said that we had to wash our hands after we touched it. The pellet smells bad. When we opened it, we found bones. When we finished removing the bones, we put them together to form a rat, bird, shrew, or mole skeleton. We then pasted the bones on a big white card. Some of the bones were hard to identify, even with the chart. Owls do not chew; they hold their prey down and rip it apart. They swallow whole chunks, and sometimes they do not eat the whole meal. We think that the owl likes to eat the heads first because all of the pellets had heads in them. We wish that we had more things to dissect.
(The writers are students of Christina Zuccaro at the Tinian Elementary School. )
