Owl Pellets

    As a human you clean your food, chew each and every bite, and then you finally digest it.  However, owls aren’t like humans in that way.  Instead of chewing their food, owls swallow their prey whole.  That’s where the owl pellets come in.  When the owl swallows their prey whole, there are still bones, fur, and all the parts that the owl can’t digest.  The owl needs a way to get rid of all that junk.  To do this the owl spits up the extra things in the form of an owl pellet.  The owl pellet is basically just an oval shaped pellet that is coated with fur has all the stuff in it that the owl can't digest.  It’s good the owl spits up the pellet.  First, it gets all the indigestible foods out of the owl’s body and secondly, the scientists can study the pellets to see what the owl eats. 
     The first step to dissecting an owl pellet is getting an owl pellet (see gallery below.) You can buy one at a wildlife store, bird of prey center gift shop, or you can find one by yourself under a tree in the woods.  The ones at the store are already cleaned so you don’t have to worry about germs.  However, if you find one by yourself you need to clean it.  You’ll need rubber gloves, a plastic container, water and bleach solution, a paper towel, and tweezers to do this. 
     First, you place the owl pellets in your plastic container.  Then, you have to put the water and bleach solution in the container and completely cover the pellet.  After you do that, you let it sit for about one hour.  Then your pellet is clean.
     Now you’re ready to examine your owl pellet.  First, you have to take your owl pellet and open it up with your tweezers and your toothpicks.  Then you use your tweezers and you carefully take out all of the bones (see gallery below.)
     There are many kinds of bones you can find in an owl pellet.  You can find skulls, leg bones, ribs, the vertebrates, feet, jaws, and shoulders (see gallery below.)  The skull is easy to find because it is shaped like a head (see gallery below.)  Most of the time you won't find the skull in one piece.  The leg bones should look like a rodent leg.  They are round on the top and thin in the middle and round again on the top.  The ribs look like thin sticks.  They are thin and curved in the middle.  The vertebrae are small and oddly shaped.  If you are lucky, you will find the jaw in one piece, but it is usually broken in half. 
     As you explore the pellet, you’re going to find many bones that you can’t identify. To help you with this, you need to have a bone identifying chart (see gallery below.)  After you’ve collected all of the bones, a fun thing to do is to try to arrange them correctly on cardboard to discover the animal that the owl swallowed (see gallery below.)

Photo Gallery

Owl pellets from different species of owl.	A vole skeleton.
Bones found in the owl pellet.	You should try to find a bone diagram because it helps you with identification.
A whole vole jaw.	Me disecting an owl pellet.