I remember the first time I opened an owl pellet. What a world of discovery! I had stumbled across a Barn Owl roost in an abandoned silo one spring afternoon. Below the chute was a small pile of damp, furry boluses (soft masses of chewed food). I examined each one, picking them up and carefully placing them on an old sack. The fact that they were tough enough to survive the long fall from the Barn Owl’s perch left no impression on me at the time. This was my finest discovery to date, and I treated the pellets with care and respect like those Egyptian artifacts I had watched archeologists excavate on TV.

I looked at them off and on for a couple of days, debating on whether I should destroy their integrity and dig in or preserve my wonderful scientific find. Finally, my curiosity convinced me to unravel just one. I slowly loosened the hair, being ever so careful not to break anything I might discover. And there it was. A jaw bone! I was no Marlin Perkins, but I knew a jaw bone when I saw one. Then there were those big front teeth of the skull, the incisors, and they were still embedded in a nearly perfect skull. Wow! This beat catching garter snakes any day. And it got better. Hip

Figure 1  Owl pellets may be found below a roost or a nest in a tree cavity.

bones, leg bones, backbones, and even the tiny claws. It was all there, a complete little skeleton-without all of that obtrusive flesh covering up the good stuff.

Before I knew it, my small pile of owl pellets was a collection of loose skeletons—moles, rats, mice, and birds. How foolish I would have been to leave such a treasure unexplored!

Don’t Chew Your Food

What are owl pellets? The pellets that we study in the classroom are the end products of an owl’s digestive process. Pellets are also made by other raptors (birds of prey), but those made by owls tend to be the most complete, and therefore the best for classroom applications. This is because of the different feeding styles of the two groups.

Falcons and hawks (order Falconiformes) typically feed on the same types of prey as owls, but their pellets are less common and more difficult to study. These birds of prey usually skin or pluck their meals, then strip away the fleshy portions—much like flesh-eating mammals do.  Some bone is ingested, but almost never the complete skeleton. When a pellet eventually is expelled, it contains loose teeth and partially digested bone fragments from several meals—not much use in a classroom setting.

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