These are owl pellets. The one in the midddle is a barn owl pellet.

Owl pellets contain fur, bones and mucous and other gross stuff. Most people think that pellets are owl poop but they are wrong. Owl pellets are an owls dinner, they digest as much of it up as they can but the rest is regurgitate remnants of the animal. For science during the next month our home school group is going to dissect owl pellets. We are ordering them from online. Most owls regurgitate 1-3 pellets per day. When an owl first throws one up they are smelly and covered in mucous. I have never found one before. People say that you have to look around dead trees with holes or nests in them. Most pellets are between 1-5 inches long. It depends on the meal.

OWLS

This is the eastern screech owl.


This is a young screech owl, see the horizontal stripes on its chest.


This is where the eastern screech owl lives.




The other night we heard Eastern screech owls. There were three of them! For the next two weeks I am going to study Eastern screech owls. Their scientific name is, megascops acio. They eat rodents, salamanders, insects, and bats. They hunt all day, from dawn to dusk, and throw up 2-4 pellets every day. Screech owls are so small snakes, skunks, raccoons, mink, blue jays, and even bigger owls like to eat screech owls. The males make a low trill to attract females. The females make a loud hoot or barking sound and the young make a peeping sound when they are hungry. When they are young they have gray horizontal lines on their chest, and the mature owls have vertical lines on their chest. During the mating season, which lasts from March through May, the male calls to attract a female. If he is lucky he will blink at her. If she is not impressed, she will go on to find another mate. When they build their nests they usually build it in an old woodpecker hole about 50 feet off the ground. They live to be between about 10-20 years old.


September 27,2007


Today I did more research on eastern screech owls.
They have a great sense of smell, and even better eye sight. I looked up the Classification System.

Kingdom - Animalia
Phylum - Chordata
Class - Aves
Order - Strigiformes
Family - Strigidae
Genus - Megascops Asio
Species - Eastern Screech Owl

I also looked at a gold finch feather under the microscope. It was really cool!
The part in the middle of a feather is called a shaft. Barbs are the thin thread like things growing off of the shaft. In between each barb are tiny net like things that lock the barbs together. The feather we looked at was a wing feather. The way I could tell is simple; if the shaft is close to the outside of a feather, it means that is from the front of a wing. All bird bones are hollow which makes it easier for them to fly.

Chrysalis

This is the chrysalis that the caterpillar will form in.

The anatomy of a caterpillar!!