Another school year has arrived and I am busy with my Ecologist-In-Residence programs. I still have some visits to write about from last year. I’ll try to catch up, but I do have some results from my most recent visit to Bell Top Elementary School in East Greenbush, NY.
Mrs. O’Connell chose my Owl Ecology program for her 3rd grade class. She has selected a theme on owls for her class. The students will be doing research about owls from around the world and she felt that starting the year off with a session on owl ecology would be good. She was also very excited to be able to have the students take apart owl pellets.
We dissected 11 pellets and found the skeletal remains of 21 voles, 1 shrew, no moles and no birds. The average of 2 animals per pellet is a little low from my experience. I did note that the pellets I got for this class were smaller than the usual pellets I have gotten in the past. I think that is reflected in the number of prey animals per pellet.
Look through the archived entries for other owl pellet explorations and see how these numbers compare to what other classes have found in the past.
I am going to try to catch up with some blogs about programs I did last spring and experiences from this summer. This includes a pond ecology session I did last spring including some video of a few pond creatures, an interesting ground bee that I found while doing sheep shearing for kindergarteners and 1sr graders and a cannibal grasshopper we found this summer while traveling out west.
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