Owl Pellet Disection

My son and I went to a birds of prey/owl pellet disection field trip last spring. Today we (well mostly I, but he did do some of the tedious work) finished dissecting the pellet. We just never remembered to get around to it. It was really cool. We were led to beleive we probably wouldn't have a full skelleton, though we did get far enough last spring to know there was a skull of some type in there. Well, we found two almost complete skelletons in this pellet. The one we disected today was just a little larger than the one shown in the photo below. I am amazed at the amount of stuff that came out of and how tightly packed the pellet was. We think they are both voles. Tomorrow we are going to inspect it under the stereoscope.

I have needed to do some more hands on type of learning (as opposed to always book work) so today I decided we would start on this project. He was very excited to see me get it out. I really must do more activity based learning with him. Tomorrow I may add some close up photos to this post.