Natural History Lesson at Home: Owl Pellet Dissection

Remember that owl pellet I found on my Nature Notes walk the other week? No? That’s ok, because my son did. I brought it home to dissect with him so we could see if we could figure out what the owl had been eating.

Just to recap, here’s the owl pellet as I found it:

And then post-dissection (please note my fancy dissection tools – pencils):

My son was disappointed that we weren’t able to re-create an entire mouse skeleton, but we still found some interesting stuff to examine. The contents were mostly bone fragments, but among other things we found no less than  5 lower mandible sections (I believe these are technically referred to as ramus); if you look closely at the picture below you can see them; it appears that this owl ate at least two and more likely three little critters – or their heads, anyway:

The other cool find was the mostly intact remains of a foot – I broke part of it trying to tease it out of the fur mat it was embedded in:

It’s really hard to see, but it’s the bit in the center of the photo. If you look carefully you can see several slender bones (tarsals? metatarsals?) lying all together.

There are guides out there that help you identify the bones of animals likely to be found in owl pellets – they often come with an owl pellet dissection kit. I don’t happen to have one, but I wasn’t overly fussed about identifying the animals that belonged to these bones – it was fun just to take the pellet apart and see what we could find.

For the record, my oldest was really only interested for the first 5 minutes, then he wandered off to do his own thing. I called him over periodically to see different things, but his attention span is pretty limited. I was just psyched that he wanted to do this with me in the first place.