If your kids are anything like my kids they love words like, PUKE, poop, tinkle, barf, GAK, the list really could go on forever!! AND if your kids are anything like my kids they love animals and just about anything that has to do with them. SO...when I busted out this little kit of Owl Puke they basically went berserk!!! This kit was purchased off of amazon for about 10$. It came with an amazing book about all-things-owl, and then the most exciting part the PELLET.. or PUKE!
I had my littles follow the Scientific Method. Our Question- What do you think owls eat? They came up with a Hypothesis- berries, bugs and small animals. We then gathered our Materials- The kit, the book to read about Owls, a little dusting brush, bone separation chart, pencil and paper. Then the Procedure- I gently broke apart the pellet into 3 pieces. We each took our pellet and broke it up to find inside the bones of animals the owl could not digest. The bones were in sort of a ball of grey packed dust, which we soon found out was most likely rodent hair mixed with mucus from the owls stomach...GAK! We then came up with our Conclusion- By looking at what we found in the owl puke we now know that owls eat small rodents, moles, rats, field mice and other small birds. We know now that owls have two stomachs to digest their food and they always swallow their food whole. The parts of the food that the owls can not digest get sent back to stomach number 1 where mucus forms them into this pellet, the owls then GAK and the small ball of indigestible parts are removed from the owls body...COOL!!!
Some of the bigger pieces we found in the pellet. Jaw bones with teeth, front and back leg bones, ribs and a SKULL...Khloe unveiled that one!
Owl Pellet Project
We then went to google for one. more. thing. To identify the skull of this animal. My Mom was here visiting during this and we concluded from pictures (the first image taken from the computer, the second image out find) that the skull in our pellet was most likely that of a RAT!
Have to say it was a fun, hands-on, experiment and everyone seemed to enjoy it!
No comments:
Post a Comment