Well, since it was an owl pellet there wasn’t that much left for me to clean, just ligaments and barf gunk. But what I did was I started by getting rid of as much of the grey barf as possible by poking and scraping it off the bones with barbecue sticks. After I had gotten most of the stuff off, I placed the bones in a small plastic container filled with water to macerate them.

I let them sit there for as long as the ligaments connecting the bones together broke. (Took a few weeks - they were pretty much covered in algae at that point). Then I rinsed the bones under running water in a makeshift sieve (punched holes with a small nail on a yoghurt can, any bigger holes and the small toe bones would’ve been flushed away) to get rid of the remaining tissue and gunk. After I deemed them clean of gunk I placed them in another container full of hydrogen peroxide to bleach them, as they were still kinda grey and had algae on them. Three days later they were in the condition they are now so I took them out, let them dry, put them in another box for safekeeping and felt good about myself.

As a bit of a disclaimer: Macerating bones with flesh on them is a stinky process. My owl barf bones had already been digested once so I didn’t have to get rid of any flesh and therefore the maceration water just had a faint stale and swampy smell, instead of stinking like rotting flesh. Also, it didn’t have any grease in it, so it was safe to flush down the bathroom pipes without having to worry about it causing a blockage or stink problems.