>> Watch our owl pellet video to see what you can find inside!
(Safety Note: Most owl pellets you can buy are sterilized to kill bacteria, but take care not to dissect a pellet near food or put any part of it in your mouth. Use disposable gloves or wash your hands well after working with the pellet.)
1. Carefully inspect the outside of the pellet and note its size (and weight, if you can), whether there are any feathers visible, and whether there are any clues to where the pellet was found. Guess how many different animal skeletons the pellet contains.
2. Next, gently pull apart the pellet with tweezers, being careful not to break any of the bones inside it. Use toothpicks or a teasing needle to help separate the bones from the fur or feathers. Take special care when removing the skulls and jawbones, since they are the best way to identify the animals that the owl ate. Group similar bones together. When you’ve finished sorting the bones, roll the last bits of fur between your fingers to find little bones or teeth that might have been overlooked. Once you’ve found all the bones, try to reconstruct the skeletons of the animals.
3. Use an identification key to classify the bones. You can use this simple owl pellet bone chart for help sorting them. Owls usually eat more than one rodent before regurgitating the remains, so you should be able to find multiple bones that are similar. Can you distinguish between the bones of different kinds of rodents based on their size?
How many different kinds of animals did you find evidence of in the pellet? How many animals were there in total? What can you conclude about the eating habits of the owl that made your pellet?
If you want to keep the bones, you can soak them in diluted bleach for three minutes to whiten them a little (be careful not to leave them in too long!). Then you can glue them to a piece of cardstock for display.
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Kids Nature Backpack Kit
Design your scavenger list with the ages of the participants in mind. Younger kids may get frustrated if the items on their list are too hard to find, while older kids will enjoy the challenge. If your group is well-suited to it, have a prize for the person who checks the most things off the scavenger list. (Here are some inexpensive science gift ideas.)
Have a manageable list for the amount of time you have to work with. If you only have an hour or two, just make a list of things each participant needs to look for. For a longer-term project, include things to collect, activities to do, and things to photograph.
Scavenger Hunt Ideas
The possibilities for a nature scavenger hunt are endless! The following are some ideas to get you started designing your own scavenger list:
Things to See
Things to Collect
Things to Do
Things to Photograph
If you’re doing a hunt with a group, it’s fun to make an open-ended list that allows the participants to be creative in how they interpret it. A few examples:
This kind of list is fun because each group will come back with completely different discoveries!
Make a Display
It’s a great idea to keep a nature notebook with a record of everything you see on your nature explorations. Your notebook can include pressed flowers and leaves, pictures you took with a disposable camera, written descriptions, drawings, and more. Display three-dimensional objects in a display case or keep them in their own decorated cardboard nature box. Items such as seashells and rocks can make an attractive decoration in a glass jar. Insects can be pinned and labeled to be kept either on a piece of corrugated cardboard, or in a more permanent and attractive exhibit case. After hunting all summer, you should have quite a satisfactory collection!
Nature Tools
Before setting out on a nature expedition, gather a few important tools from around the house:
You don’t need lots of fancy equipment to observe nature, but here is a list of suggested tools to make your study even more rewarding:
This site has step-by-step instructions for how to draw animals from insects to mammals – great practice for your nature notebook!
Watch animals you won’t find in your back yard with the Smithsonian National Zoo’s animal webcams.
A group of kids can have a blast outside with these nature-related outdoor games.
– As we know from the phrase “light as a feather,” individual feathers are light—but nearly a quarter of a bird’s total weight is in its feathers. Sometimes the feathers weigh more than the bird’s skeleton!
– A human has 7 vertebrae in the neck, but an owl has 14, enabling it to turn its head nearly all the way around to look for prey.
– The age of a mammal can sometimes be determined by looking at a cross-section of a tooth under a microscope. Inside a tooth there are annual bands that can be counted like tree rings!
– Some plants, like Venus flytraps or pitcher plants, actually capture insects and digest them for protein! These plants still perform photosynthesis to make their food, but they have to supplement with nutrients from insects.