I do not know about you but we are so fascinated with owls. Now we love all kinds of birds but this particular bird is quite special. It could be due to the fact that they are so secretive and only come out at night. Maybe it is because they have large eyes and ears. They also can turn their head a full circle and a half in each direction. Now that is way too cool.
There are more than 100 species of owls and owls live all around the world, except for Antarctica. There are woodland owls, tropical owls, wilderness owls, and desert owls. We decided to make paint some owls on fabric.
What you need: watercolors, canvas fabric, mod podge, scissors, needle, embroidery thread, poly-fil, and paint brush.
You will first want to draw the owl using a pencil. Then you paint the owl. After it has dried apply mod podge. Let it dry. Using embroidery yarn stitch the name of the owl. Then cut the owl out (leaving enough room). Make sure you cut two of the same sizes. We stitch front and back together, leaving just enough room for poly-fil. Once we have stuffed every owl with poly-fil we stitch the rest of the owl up. We usually add a string to the top of the owls so that we can then hang our creations up on the fridge or tree.
Owls’ Skeleton
We decided to make an owls’ skeleton using Rice Krispies. There are a lot of good recipes online. Esther made ours. We then looked at a picture of the owl’s skeleton and tried to replicate what we saw. The owls’ skeleton is said to be very lightweight but at the same time strong. If you have been following us for awhile you probably have noticed that we love learning about the anatomy of different living things.
Owl Food Chain
Since an owl is a bird of prey it is at the top of a food chain which means that nothing eats it. We all need energy to live. Without energy our body will not function properly and we won’t be able to do anything. We would die without energy. The way every living thing gets energy is by eating. A food chain looks different for different living things. However, for a barn owl its food chain starts with a grasshopper or insect who gets its energy from the sun. A mouse eats the insect. A snake eats the mouse and then the owl eats the snake. The food web is connected and while I gave you an example of this food web there can be different variations to who eats what.
We got our food chain activity from Nature Watch.
Owl Pellets
Did you know that owls swallows their prey whole : bones, hair, and all? They usually swallow their prey head first. Because an owl can not digest everything they pack the things they can’t digest into pellets and then spit them out. The pellet is the only thing you can own that once belonged to an owl in the United States. It is illegal to owl even an owl feather. It sure is neat to see what the owl has eaten. We even found a few skulls in one pellet. If an owl can not swallow their food whole such as skunk, squirrels, or rabbits it will shred them by using its beak. The pellet is coughed up from the owls second stomach. Surprisingly the owl pellets have no scent. The owl will spit out a pellet 12 hours after it has eaten its prey. We got three synthetic substitute for owl pellets as well as three real pellets. We ordered our pellets from Nature Watch.
Bird Masks
What does a barn owl, eagle, kingfisher, and gull have in common? Any guesses? Well, the answer is that they all produce pellets. If you try to look up gull pellets to purchase you most likely won’t find any. Because we have always saw barn owl pellets for sale we automatically thought that owls were the only birds that produced owl pellets but this is far from the truth. It is just that barn owl pellets are easy to collect and the other birds who eat their pray whole are not.
We decided to make masks out of the birds who produce pellets. These masks were made out of chicken wire.
What you need is : chicken wire, wire cutters, masking tape, school glue, newspaper, cardboard boxes to cut out, gloves, glue gun with glue sticks, paint, and paint brush.
Below we have included a video on how we made our masks. It only took us two days to do. We also painted only one layer but I recommend doing two layers so it should take three days to make a mask like this. We used sculpting clay for the birds eyes which is a bad idea because once they dried they tried to fall off. We made these masks just for fun. Not for a costume. You can use anything you have around. Esther used small strips of paper for her bird. Eve used paper towels to make the owls face.
We plan to make many more of these type of paper Mache masks. We used school glue, water, and newspapers for our Mache. Lots of people use flour and water but in the past we haven’t had such success using that method so do it the way you know how to best.
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