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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A lucky week for me but an unlucky one for a badger

This week has all been about good luck and bad luck. The good luck for me on Monday was I finally got my leg cast off ! But the bad news is they put another one on so it'll be on for another two weeks. The other bad news is there was a badger killed by a car just outside my village - but this was good news for me because it's the first badger I've found, and I didn't even know there were badgers living there !

I've never seen a badger in the wild. They are quiet and secretive and only come out at night, and their setts are usually well hidden, so often the only time people see them is as roadkill. I've been living in the village all my life and I never knew they were living nearby. It was as Dad was driving me and my brothers to the hospital on Monday to get my cast looked at that we noticed something by the side of the road.

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Comparing bones: scapulas (shoulder blades)

This is my first ever post about comparing the same bone from lots of different animals from my collection. It's different to my normal blog posts because I had to do a lot of research, but interesting because I got to look at how each animal has adapted to where they live and what they do.

Everything about scapulas I have found on the internet is very complex and scientific. I try not to write my blog like that, and I only try to use words I understand myself to make my posts easy to understand. I've picked the scapula for my first one of these posts because it is a relatively big bone that varied quite a lot between each animal type. I've tried to look at each animal and how it lives to understand why its scapula ended up that way, so some of what I have written is guesswork, and some is from reading books and the internet. So here it is.

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The unlucky roe deer and the interesting sheep skull

My leg plaster is on for at least another ten days, so this is a story about a walk I did about a month ago.  I went up to a wood I had explored before that was on the big moor near my house. The wood is a pine plantation with tons of roe deer that live there, and it can be seen from the deserted farmhouse I wrote about a few weeks ago.

Before I went I remembered it as being full of bones, so dad and I split up and went down opposite sides of the wood to search as much ground as possible. There weren't as many bones as I remembered, but I found some other interesting things instead.

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My common European gruffalo skull

Last year when I was strolling in Depedarke Wood, I spotted something that looked especially good. Hidden deep in the dirt beside a wall there was a skull that was both wide and tall. It was unlike anything I had seen before with its terrible tusks and terrible jaws.

I dug it up to take back, placing it carefully in my rucksack. It was very heavy and took up loads of space, but coming back I had a smile on my face. I was looking forward to looking it up on skullsite.co.uk; then I could work out whether to keep it or whether to sell it on Ebay.

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My dad's good deed that didn't end well

Normally I go on one walk a week, but because I have a broken leg at the moment, Dad has been going on walks by himself. Yesterday while I was at school dad took the day off work and planned a big walk to explore a new wood. The walk was to go up in the snowy hills on a moor near my house, and go up the side of a steep valley. The wood was on the side of the valley on a very steep slope with a river at the bottom. After exploring the wood he would find a way to cross the river and head up on the other side to a deserted farmhouse and make his way back.

He parked his car then walked up and took the main route up the hills up past the snow line. There where lots of deer out because the snow was covering up their food and they needed to spend a lot more time finding and eating food in the snowy weather. He says he saw about 50 in total. The way where he wanted to go was too dangerous because of snowdrifts, so he came down to the bottom edge of the wood and that is where the story really begins.

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My African Grey Parrot skull

My village in Scotland doesn't have many parrots, so I had to buy this skull off ebay. I bought it at the end of last year but didn't get round to writing about it until now, when I can't go on walks because of my stupid broken leg.

If you are at all interested in bird skulls, parrot skulls are particularly interesting. All bird skulls show how that particular type of bird gets food, like the thin long beak of an oystercatcher, or the curved short bills of raptors, or the very specialised beaks of crossbills. Parrots have evolved over time to specialise in eating hard seeds, but they look completely different to, say, finches which also eat seeds.

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