Owl Pellets

My time of substitute teaching has brought me to a seventh grade science class. I had a science minor in college so some of the concepts are familiar to me. I was excited to learn that I would be dissecting owl pellets with the classes because this was something I had done in college.

For those of you not familiar with middle school science, an owl pellet is a hard egg-shaped pellet that consists of hair and bones. Owls swallow their food (mice, rats, voles, birds) whole and they cannot digest the hair and bones. The pellets are regurgitated and left to decompose. Unless you are a middle school science teacher and then you have your students take them apart, separate the bones and put the tiny skeletons back together to see what the owl ate for dinner.

This is a cool activity because the students do it all themselves and have to identify the bones. The bones are tiny and most of the time the skulls are intact which adds to the grossness factor for the more squeamish.  Below are pictures from our project starting with the pellet, the bones and the final projects.