Thursday, May 1, 2008
Owl Pellets, Anyone?
Yesterday we went to a friend's house for an "Owl Puke Party." For those of you unfamiliar with owl puke (also called pellets)--basically when an owl eats a rodent it cannot digest the bones and fur so it pukes it up after it is done with the meat and organs. You can dissect an owl pellet and find all sorts of bones and get an idea of what it has recently eaten. These owl pellets are ones you can order and supposedly have been sanitized--not sure how they do that. Anyway, we learned a little about owls and then dissected these owl pellets. As you can tell from Hannah's expressions, she was totally disgusted. To be honest, I was too. Grace was fine, of course. Both girls did a good job picking through their pellets and they found a lot of little bones and even a skull. Jessica--if you are interested I can get you the website where we ordered these from. I really think you should do them with your boys. :0)
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4 comments:
Okay, am I the only one who's never ever heard of this? You do the most interesting things w/your kids. I can just imagine you guys reminiscing about it all when they get older!
OK, I'm thinking no but thanks. Have you met my mother? I'm a little like her - no owl pettets for me. You would have a better chance of convincing me to raise flightless fruit flies :) I'm going to have to go with Hannah on this one.
Jessica
Harrison did these several years ago. They are facinating...gross but facinating. He actually had to glue all the bones in skeleton form to decide what the owl ate. Yuck!
Wow. That would be difficult to glue all the bones together since they are so fragile that a lot of them break when digging them out of the plastered fur. Maybe there's an easier way of doing the digging? It's sure fun, though.
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