Owl pellets

What is an owl pellet?  A lot of people think that owl pellets are owl poo but an owl pellet is actually the undigested parts of an owl's food after the owl has regurgitated it.  Nice!  So in other words, owl throw up.

Now even though these are not poo, they do smell a little rancid in my opinion.  They look and feel like hard hairballs.  They contain bones, claws, teeth, and hair/fur of the animals that were ingested.

Owl pellets.

A close up!

It is hard to see this clearly but we found a few feather parts and a lot of little bones. 

We thought the owl pellets were hard, smelly, and gross but it was fun digging into them.  If this is not your thing or you do not have access to owl pellets, you can go to KidWing and do a virtual owl pellet dissection online that is fantastic! Here are a few notebooking pages to use to record your data.

Don't let this cute face fool you.  He did it!

If you are going to work with the real owl pellets, it is recommended that you handle them while wearing gloves.  I would also like to recommend dissecting them in an area where no pet cats are allowed to roam.  After we dissected the pellets, we noticed that our little Smokey did his own dissection and ran off with a few pieces of the bones.  I still have not located them.