Owl Pellet Dissection“The Fur Ball”

This week everybody in my class was given a real owl pellet to dissect. My Papa volunteered to help in class  Everybody in the class got their own owl pellet to dissect. The owl pellets came wrapped in foil and are about 4” long and about 1 1/2” in diameter. Don’t worry, they are dry and don’t smell. We each spent about 45 minutes taking them apart to find out what was inside. You can tell how healthy the owl is by how well he was eating. My owl must have been very healthy, I found a bunch of bones mixed in the with the fur and feathers. I found vole and mole skulls, a whole pile of leg, rib, tail bones and even some parts of other birds. The next step of the project is to separate the bones into types and then count them. The last step is to glue the bones to a skeleton sheet. That was a little messy but when you get it done it looks fantastic. It was a really cool science project.