Owl Puke

[Ginafish]

If you've known someone in middle school or junior high recently, you might have already heard about Owl Puke. My mother thought this would be a great Valentine's Day gift for my 7 year old and he and his younger sister loved it!

http://www.stevespanglers...nce.com/product/owl-puke1

It comes as a sanitized pellet that kids often dissect in class. I wasn't there or I would have taken before and after pictures. Here's photos of bones collected. (the dark round things are vertebrae)



Here's an article about how it got started:
http://seattlepi.nwsource...efrom=1&searchdiff=28

So buy one today for yourself or the young geek you know.

[ZeroG]

I ran a activity at a Cub Scout day camp where the kids dissected these things. 5 days of
kids tearing these things apart. A couple of kids got queezy. I think I did too when we found
a skeleton of a small bird instead of the normal rodent. Basically the owl doesn't digest the fur or the bones, and swallows the rodent whole. So you are picking apart the parts the owl didn't digest.

I guess they do it in Cub Scouts because it is wild life, and very sanitary.

Some kids thought is was cool, others thought it was gross.

[M3R1IN]

I remember doing this in Biology in College except we have to clean the bones and re-construct the complete skeleton correctly while identifying all the bones.. took about 20 hours on average because the bones are very brittle and great care is needed to avoid breaking them.  I got parts of a bird and a prairie dog in my pellets.

[Mus.]

So basically you buy digested animal corpses in bags?

[Ginafish]

The owl puke was a small brown football that looked like dried up brown stuff. You have to pick it apart to see the bones. And no doubt, there were bones from more than one animal. So kind of digested animal corpses, but more like animal skeletons.

[Hunter]

So let me get this straight. They take a rodent-bodybag, put it in a box, and sell it. This way you can pick though and identify remains.

Two things come to mind.

1) Jr. CSI.

2) Some Assembly Required.

[Ginafish]

No assembly required for the Owl Puke. The handy book with it told us that we had multiple jaws. It's unlikely that there is a complete skeleton of anything.
The skeleton bits can belong to rodents, shrews, moles, birds, caterpillar, etc...

And yes, very Jr. CSI like. Although, there isn't any mystery as to the cause of death.

[M3R1IN]

Sorry, ginafish, a caterpillar being an insect and an invertebrate will likely not leave anything behind in the gizzard of an owl because chitin(the matter which insects are made of) can be digested by them.  so no insect parts unless they got in there after regurgitation.

[Ginafish]

Clarification: Caterpillar larvae, cocoons, and droppings. Owls swallow prey whole while Eagles and hawks tear into their prey. Owls digestive system has less acid than other raptors. Their pellets contain more fur and they don't have a crop (a loose sac in the birds throats where they store food to eat and digest at a later time).

More information than you wanted to know! The pellet came with a VERY Informative book. And yes, it's interesting...to a geek mom like me.

[KitKat]

  All the info you've read is very useful raising a son. Boys love this kind of stuff, your young daughter may be interested too.