Barn Owl Pellet Experience

This wee, at WOW! Club, we had a go at dissecting some barn owl pellets. Some had come all the way from Heligan in Cornwall. AT Heligan, they have barn owls nesting in a nest box in an old derelict barn and they also have a live camera on the owls. You can watch them at http://www.heliganwild.com/webcams. You may see some pellets in the nest box. Others are shed into the barn and collected. Sam made a film about his barn owls at Heligan and you can see it on YouTube HERE

Some of the other pellets came from the Staffs Barn Owl Action group. A big thank you to Helen and Sam for sending them to us.

We learnt that barn owls hunt over fields where their prey live. One of their favourite prey is field voles which live in the long grass. The Barn owl captures its prey with its talons and then swallows its prey whole. Their stomachs break down the vole, absorbing all the goodness from it. There are bits left that their bodies cannot absorb... the bones and the fur. The owl 'spits' out all these bits in a little package called a pellet. These pellets are amazing as they tell us all about what the owl has been eating. This, in turn, tells us about the small mammals that live in the area and how healthy the habitat is.

We had soaked the pellets in disinfectant and then used some BBQ skewers to help us tease the pellets apart so we could see what our owls had been eating. It was amazing! We found all sorts of bones and skulls. Some of us had three of four skulls in one pellet.... meaning the owl had been a really successful hunter! !This also tells us that the habitat is a healthy one, supporting lots of small mammals which, in turn, become food for the top predator, our barn owl!

Here we are... completely engrossed!....

We really enjoyed dissecting the pellets and looking at them under our little microscope. We learnt loads!

Bird School's Bird Watch

We have been busy preparing for the Big School's Birdwatch and our bird feeding station has been grwoing... and with that so have the numbers and species visiting!

We were really lucky to have a super feeder and some food donated to us from Peckish Bird Foods. We loved the feeder as we thought it looked like a rocket. The bags of food were super too as one bag had a brill spout which made pouring really easy and the other had a plastic zip on it, so we could reseal the bag. We all thought these were really cool design features! Peckish had also sent us some fat balls and feeders for those! THANK YOU!!!

We had got a new metal pole with hooks on so we could have even more feeders, so we filled everything up and hung all the treats up ready for our feathered friends!

 All that was left was to put the finishing touches to our display....

... and to finish off the bird feeders we had started to make last week. We took these home with us to put in our own gardens.

We then left the new feeders for the birds to get used to them... it did not take long!

On the Monday, we then did our bird watch and were delighted to see lots!

- Blackbirds
- Woodpigeons
- Great tits
- Blue tits
- Greenfinches
- Goldfinches
- Chaffinches
- Dunnocks
- Robin
- Magpies
- Crows

... and we are getting better at recognising them now...

Milk Carton Bird Feeders

Last week, we all started to design some feeders. We had spent the week gathering materials and ideas and this week we set to work building! Some of us collected twigs and moss and we had lots of ideas!
We cut little windows out of the cartons for the birds to get the food and tried to make little perches. It was not as easy as some of us thought as we had so many things to think about....
- How would the birds get the food?
- Where would they perch?
- How will the food stay dry?
- What types of food will our feeder feed?
- How will we hang the feeders up?

Here are some shots of us working hard to create something that the birds will like using.....

What's in mixed bird seed & which do our birds like best?

This week at WOW! Club we started to prepare for The RSPB Big School's BirdWatch. We looked at the materials we had got through the post and talked about how we might organise the watch. We already have a bird table and one feeding station set up, but decided to set up another, which is visible to some of our other classes. There was already a wooden frame on the fence, so perfect for another set of feeders....

We taked all about how to attract the most species of birds... we decided the two key things would be the types of food we put out and the ways we fed it. We thought it would be like only offering one dish at a restaurant... you would only get people visiting who liked that one dish. If you didn't like it, you would go somewhere else to eat.

We have a bag of Ark Wildlife Premium Bird seed. What species would that attract? We decided to analyse what was actually in this food. We each got a pile of it and we sorted it into the different types of seeds present....

 We could recognise some of the seeds: Black sunflower, striped sunflower, sunflower hearts, rolled oats, flaked maize, wheat..... and some we didn't recognise.

We wondered which seeds the birds would like best? We devised a test to try to find out. We took about the same amount of each seed type and placed it in some little containers that we cut out of recycled plastic cups.....

We then blue tacked these little pots onto our bird table. We are going t see which seed types are eaten first and try to see which are most popular!

Once we had set this up we got thinking about bird feeders of our own design. In next week's club we are going to make our own seed dispensing bird feeders. We started sketching some ideas. We will collect the materials we need over the week and bring them in next week.

Back to a new term with WOW! Club

We have welcomed some newcomers to Wildlife Club. When I originally set up the club, we had so may children wanting to join, that I said they could do a term each. When we came to the end of the winter term, my current members didn't want to leave and with them so keen, I could not stop them taking part. Instead, we have just welcomed additional members! This term, some pupils are attending some additional lessons leading up to SATs, so our numbers were a little depleted... room for some new faces.

This term we have lots of exciting projects in and around our school grounds and we will be sharing them with you over the coming months! Keep popping back to see what we have been doing this term at WOW! Club.