Feathered Friends – Birds of Prey Visit Hawford

Reception and Kindergarten 2 welcomed some very majestic feathered visitors into school last week – beautiful birds of prey from The Falconry Centre, Hagley.

The children were lucky enough to meet a peregrine falcon, a barn owl, a spectacled owl, and an eagle owl.

Reception have been learning all about animals as part of their topic work since Easter, starting with tigers, then moving on to sea creatures and now birds.  They’ve been focussing on owls in the last couple of weeks and specifically what and how they eat.

Did you know they swallow their food whole and can’t digest the bones and fur? Instead they spit these out into the form of a pellet. Miss Lane collected some owl pellets from the International Bird of Prey Centre in Newent and the children dissected the gory contents to see which small mammals the owls had been eating! We found lots of bones from mice and shrews by comparing the bones to a chart to find out which were which.

Miss Lane said: “We’ve loved learning all about animals in this term’s topic, it’s such an exciting subject matter for young learners. Having the owls come into school really helped to bring the learning to life, as did dissecting the owl pellets – which the children were absolutely thrilled to do.”