Melissa Harrison (https://twitter.com/m_z_harrison) kindly sent me a Barn Owl pellet in the post this week for home examination! 

I’ll be honest members of my household were confused at first sight of it, suggesting I’d asked for an animal poo by post… I persuaded them it really was an owl pellet and my 10-year-old daughter was intrigued enough to agree to explore its contents.

If you’ve never come across the term before, an owl pellet is the remains of an owl’s dinner. Owls swallow their prey whole and digest it at the end of a night’s hunting. The fur and bones of their prey are indigestible and these are brought up by the owl as a neat, firm, odourless pellet. You may find them on the ground near the owl’s roost, in a Barn Owl’s case, near a barn or other outbuilding.

Each one is just one night’s remains and you can find bones of their favourite prey inside, including voles, mice, shrews and sometimes bats, moles or frogs. Here’s how we dissected ours!

Set-up / What you’ll need if you have a pellet to dissect

• A bowl of warm water with a little washing up liquid stirred through (add the water first so it doesn’t foam up)
• A second bowl with warm water for rinsing the bones
• Tweezers / Your fingers. If you use your hands don’t touch your face during the dissection and wash them very thoroughly when you’re finished.
• 1 inch of 3% peroxide in a glass jar. This can be contact lens solution or you may have some in a science kit. Otherwise you can use extremely diluted bleach.
• Kitchen roll / Tissue paper to dry the bones on
• Magnifying glass to examine your findings

What to do

1. Drop the pellet in the first, soapy bowl and swish it round. The water will turn dark grey as the fur starts to come off the pellet.
2. Tease apart the pellet using your tweezers or fingers. Pick out any bones and swish them in the soapy water. You may need a second bowl of clean, soapy water as you go on. 
3. Rinse them in the second bowl of clean, warm water then set on tissue paper / kitchen roll to dry.
4. Drop them carefully into 1 inch of 3% peroxide in a jar and leave to soak for 3 to 4 hours.
5. I found I had to repeat this part of the process, after an hour or two of soaking in the peroxide I could tease more fur off the bones then re-soak them in the peroxide.
6. Sieve the bones out and leave to dry again.
7. Try identifying your findings using the Barn Owl Trust ID online guide!
   https://www.barnowltrust.org.uk/sitemap/galleries/pellet-analysis/
8. Display them to your liking!

It sounds like a simple process, and it is, but it can get rather messy with all the fur clumps! We needed to clean up well afterwards. I feel rather proud of my beautifully displayed collection! Can you identify what the skulls are? I think there are 2 shrews and 3 voles.