Owl Puke

Well it has been a week of discoveries!

For example today I was rounding up my two-week science teaching of middle school lab work with a video of the barn owl.  We have been covering body systems and had started with the skeleton.  Much making of full sized black cardboard skeletons with labelled bones tied together with wool or paperclips.  In fact my entire science lab resembles a bizarre Hallowen celebration with many of the black shapes running on the walls, spread-eagled on corridors or waving frantically from a board in the classroom.  We then moved on to dissecting an owl pellet.  It was tricky justifying the expense of purchase of owl vomit in these economically challenging times, but I got it.  As owls cannot digest the bones, feathers and fur of their prey they vomit it up in these pellets so I reckoned that would be a creative way to allow them to pull all the bones out and reconstruct the victims of the owl.  Various parts of rodents, voles, birds, shrews etc were all carefully extracted from these solid lumps and then separated out into piles of each respective animal.  The lab echoed to excited cries of  “I’ve got a skull here!”, or “This is a pelvis of a rat” and they grew expert at identifying shrew skulls because the tips of their teeth are red.  Tweezers and heads bent over dead piles of bones has been our points of interest for some time and now all bones have been stuck on black card board and identified.  The corridors have been full of conversations like, “what did you find in your owl puke?”  After all these experiences I decided to close the topic with a series of videos showing owls vomiting up their owl pellets, in flight catching prey and finally one of an owl swallowing a huge rat.  So it was with complete despair, while watching them, I heard a group of students crying out, “that is so gross, what is that lump coming out of its mouth?” or comments to that effect.  At which point, several of the brighter students turned and exasperatedly pointed out that we had been dissecting owl pellets all week and of course that was what these were.  Several students looked green around the gills that they had been rummaging around in these horrid looking turds and were outraged.  At this point all my satisfaction about my lesson plans and lab work drained away.  I should have remembered when you take kids into labs a part of their brains switches off and goes into a sort of “Bunsen burner, test-tube, chemical, mesmerised state” that closes down all rational thought.  If I entered the lab and began a strange witch doctor ritual with feathers and skinned rabbits around my head it would make no difference.  You can tell, when they approach you in the lab and ask, “can we blow something up next week?”  Everything but explosions to sixth grade is a complete waste of a lab session.  Here is the owl video, be patient – it is taken by amateurs discussing their camera storage capacity.

But for me the most beautiful part is watching these birds in flight – this is 6 minutes long so don’t feel you have to watch it but there is something angelic about their flight in slow motion that grabs me.  Okay the last part is fairly gross!

It is all a learning experience.  From the sublime to the ridiculous, this life.  One minute you think you are running exciting educational science experiments the next you realize it really is just all vomit.  There is a metaphor about life in that last line.  Education is just about regurgitating stuff and life usually involves vomit for some reason!