An hour in the woods

Last Saturday, dad and I got early and went out into a local wood to sit for an hour to see what we could see. It was the first time I had been in the woods since I broke my leg. Even though my cast is off, I am still walking with crutches, and I cannot walk very far at all, but where we sat wasn't too far from the road, even though the wood is quite isolated. I call the wood The Mortuary since that is where I leave dead animals to rot down (the badger and the buzzard are there at the moment).

Most of the wood has mature pine trees with no grass or vegetation on the ground, but at the end where we were there were gaps in the trees, bracken and grass on the floor, and a small pond. A lot of the trees had been blown over in the storms of 2012 which is actually good for some wildlife. The plan was to see how much wildlife I could see in an hour by sitting and being quiet, and was inspired by the current series of BBC Springwatch. Anyway, here's what I saw !

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Why mums are brilliant

On Friday my dad went out to see if the roe deer had had their babies yet. He walked quietly around the edge of Quoiggs wood, staying clear of the bracken because roe mothers keep their babies hidden in long grass or foliage for the first few weeks, until they are strong enough to stay with their families and run from predators.

He had seen a few deer when he heard a doe ( a female roe) startle in the wood, and start barking. Deer usually bark to alert the rest of the herd to run away from danger, and this doe moved away a bit. Dad thought the wood would be clear now so he walked in and watched for birds. Then something strange happened.

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The Treasures of the Earth museum in Fort William

I have been meaning to write this post for ages, but I didn't get round to doing it at the time. It happened on the way back from my holiday on the Isle of Skye last year where there was a place I really wanted to go to at Fort William called Treasures of The Earth.

The reason I really loved going there was it was completely different from usual museums. It wasn't huge, it didn't have a huge amount of exhibits, but it was really great for kids.

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Today is a very bad day for badgers

Today is a very bad day for badgers. It is the start of a pilot badger cull in England, which means the government are doing a test to see whether shooting badgers stops TB (a lung disease) in cattle. That means that over 5,000 of the most shy and wonderful animals in Britain will be shot.

Badgers are highly protected animals. They even have their own law, the Protection of Badgers Act 1992 which protects them and their setts (burrows) from badger-baiters and others who would want to hurt them - but not stupid governments.

Cows that have TB cannot be sold or moved. They usually have to be killed. This costs £500m a year, and costs farmers money. But are badgers to blame ?  A ten year study into bovine TB in the UK said not. It said: "culling Badgers would have no meaningful effect on bovine TB in cattle". Even the government department involved that wants the cull says "the relationship between bovine TB in badgers and in cattle is highly complex". 

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Strange bones #13: the weird skull groove

This is a bit of an unusual post because it's something I can't work out so I need your help !

A couple of weeks ago dad was stalking the red deer in Suicides Graves wood and he found this skull in the valley near what I call Jake's Island. It was an incomplete young adult roe deer buck lying int he grass near the edge of trees, but what was more interesting was this unusual mark on the top of the braincase. What could have caused this ?

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A buzzard in tights; and something VERY VERY bad

(There's a REALLY IMPORTANT BIT about buzzards at the very end of this post which I want to everyone to read and do something about.)

Where I live there are lots of buzzards. They are beautiful, medium-sized birds of prey that some people mistake for golden eagles even though they are half the size. Around here they live near woods where pheasants are bred, like the Ardoch Estate and the Gleneagles Wood, and if you walked through the Ardoch Estate you would see almost a dozen nests which have been lived in by buzzards for years and years.

My friend Jack lives in a farm north of the village. One day he mentioned he had found a dead buzzard in his fields and asked if I wanted it for the bones. This is what it looked like when his grandfather brought it round a few days later:

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Seven things that Zygoma taught me about blogging

Today is the 200th "Friday Mystery Object" on the Zygoma blog, written by Paolo Viscardi. Paolo works as a natural history curator at the Horniman museum in London,and he began blogging about the same time as I did (he began in April 2009 and I began in July 2009) and every week since then he has been mainly posting about objects from his museum (mostly bones and skulls) and asking people to identify them. He's been posting every week, but after this week he's going to slow down and post less often.

Paolo first helped me when I posted about finding an unusually shaped red deer antler in August 2009, and since then I've been following his blog every week. I think doing 200 Friday Mystery Objects is a big achievement, and because I can't do a surprise party, I'm going to do this post instead about what I've learned from his blog.

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Did a horrible crime happen in this wood ?

While I have been a bone collector I have seen lots of death, and I have seen some horrible things, but nothing quite as horrible and sad as this - even though I haven't seen it with my own eyes because ever since the start of March I haven't been able to go out on walks after I broke my leg cross-country running.

At the start of April Dad went out on a walk to stalk the red deer herd that live in the woods at the north of my village. He had tracked a few and was heading back along the edge of this wood, near where he knew the hind herd liked to graze, and he took a shortcut through the corner of the wood and he got a shock.

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Is there evidence of big cats living in Scotland ?

A few weeks ago when it was snowy Dad was walking on the moor near my house. He was watching a herd of ten roe deer from a small wood when he saw something moving up the hill. It was much higher than the deer, and it was on a high up part of the mountain where deer, foxes and badgers didn't normally go. 

It was a long way away, about a kilometre, and about 600 feet higher up than he was so he couldn't see it very well. It looked black and was moving slowly and he took lots of photographs of it.

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Some great books on bone collecting

I have been meaning to write this post for ages and got round to it this week. I have loads of bone books, and I'm going to write about five of them today. There aren't in any particular order, and I have got other ones I will write about later.

I haven't yet found a perfect bone book (although my book is looking pretty amazing so far and comes out in March 2014 !) but all of these are worth buying.

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