1. Owl Pellets
Maudrey Tenly
Chappell
4-27-11

2. Procedures
First, I put on my gloves and safety
goggles for protection. Then, I put on my
face mask so I can’t breathe in the smell,
after that I took my ruler and measured
the pellet in cm. Next, I carefully
unwrapped the tinfoil and carefully pulled
it apart and began removing the bones
from the pellet.
I used forceps, a probe, a ruler, safety
goggles, latex gloves, one small foam tray
to put the bones and any other things I
found on, and one big tray to put the
pellet on when I was taking it apart.

3. Procedures
After we finished taking out our bones
we soaked them in bleach then we set
them outside to dry. We bleached them
to make them whiter because they were
a yellowish color because they had not
been exposed to the sun for them to be
bleached out.
When we were finished we took our
bones and glued them on a piece of
black paper in the order of a rodent
skeleton.

4. Pellet Information
My pellet was 3cm in length
and 1 1/2cm in width. It was
dark brown with a few signs of
feathers and a lot of fur. When
I first tore the pellet gently
apart I could see a lot of bones
that were all small.

5. My Skeleton
All of these bones in the
skeleton were from a
rodent.
I had 48 bones total but I
did not know what ten of
them where so I used
only 38 to make my
skeleton.

6. Food Web

7. Reflection of Project
I learned that owls puke up pellets
that contain bones that it was unable
to digest. I also learned that owls eat
other small birds.
The hardest part was when we had to
separate the bones into different
groups depending on what kind of
bones they were which was hard
because all of the bones looked alike.

8. Reflection of Project
The easiest part was when we had to take out
the bones because all of the bones were showing.
I would like to learn more about the process of
pellet formation. I thought that this project was a
little gross until I actually did it which was not as
bad as I thought it would be. I really would not
want to eat like an owl because it would be hard
to puke up a big pellet a few hours after I eat,
also I wouldn’t be able to chew my food, and
thats bad because I really don’t want to swallow
my food whole.

9. Conclusion
This project was really fun and I enjoyed it a lot.
If I had to choose the best part I would choose
the part when we put our skeletons together,
because it was cool to figure out what bone was
what, and what bones are supposed to go
together, even though it was hard I still enjoyed
it.