Homeschoolers Are Gross

And truth be told, we’re proud of it.  Here’s a project we’ve done more than a couple of times and I have to tell you, we never seem to get sick of it.

Owl Pellets:

Owls, like other birds, can’t chew their food.  They swallow it whole if it’s small enough, or rip it apart with their beaks into pieces that can be swallowed.

Deane explains it much better than I can - go read her explanation if you’ve got the stomach for it.  Get it?  Stomach for it?  I crack myself up.

Now, a bird’s stomach has two parts:

The first part is the glandular stomach or proventriculus, which produces enzymes, acids, and mucus that begin the process of digestion.

The second part is the muscular stomach, called the Ventriculus, or gizzard. There are no digestive glands in the gizzard, and in birds of prey, it serves as a filter, holding back insoluble items such as bones, fur, teeth and feathers …

So the gizzard holds the stuff that can’t be digested and the owl regurgitates it, much like a hairball, only with bones and teeth, fur and feathers in it.  There are lots of companies that collect these pellets and sterilize them so that crazy, homeschool moms can purchase them to rip apart, and examine with their children, and other people’s children and pretty much anyone who cares to show up on owl pellet day. We have always bought ours from Genesis.  They send you an instructor’s guide, the treated pellets, probes, worksheets that include diagrams of the different skeletons you might find in your pellet and a food web to explain the food chain to the younger kids.

Of course each pellet is different and you may find a skull, or just fragments of bone and while it’s fun no matter what you find, there’s a lot of excitement when one of the children finds a whole skull.

Gross Cool right?