Barn owl pellets

[PoppyD]

About four weeks ago we had a couple of barn owls that took over our small barn were we keep the horses food. And they leave the best presents ever.


And yes, that is my dads TShirt But he’d moan if I put them directly on my bed.

 

[nigelp]

Very nice. You should get some nice bones and things from them.

 

[PoppyD]

I really want to find a bat skull. Found one once in a tawny pellet, but the cranium was all bust up. Like opening up a birthday present. But with skulls.

 

[Robson Valley]

There's a 5th grade Owl Unit in the elementary school curriculum here. One popular exercise is owl pellet dissections. The pellets are wrapped in foil and autoclaved sterile.
Review the major bones of a mouse skeleton and let the kids go to it.
Average? 4-5 mouse skulls per pellet.

I enjoyed assisting the classes that my little kids were in to do this.

 

[PoppyD]

The coolest thing I have found in a owl pellet, apart from the bat, was a toad skull.

 

[daveO]

I left a handful of barn owl pellets on the shelf in my office and forgot about them. I only remembered when there was a bit of an outbreak of case bearing moths in the house and I tracked it down to the pellets which were pretty much heaving with larvae at that point. I've put them inside an escape proof bug box and hopefully the caterpillars are going to clean the bones off for me.

 

[JonathanD]

When she was about 7, she put some she had‘nt attacked yet into a glass so they wouldn’t crumble or get wet and put it at the back of a cupboard. Two years later we found it. Wooly bears had demolished them and done all the work. An insane amount of clothes were lost due to holes for a few years. To this day we still have a problem with them.