Lots of birds, and a mysterious find by the river

This week I have been away skiing in the Cairngorms, so the walk Dad and I planned today was fairly easy. We decided to walk along one of three rivers in my village, which is mostly straight, but we knew that sometimes there were otters down there. We didn't see any otters but we did find something else which we didn't expect !

It was sunny but cold and the ground was frozen. The river isn't very wide, but it was moving fast. It runs alongside a train track and I saw loads of trains which we were out.

A waterfall, a watermill and a brand new wood

Around my house there are about a dozen woods that I have explored already, and this year I want to find new woods to explore. Last Saturday night Dad looked on a map and found a new wood that he thought would be good to explore. We had a good time exploring it last Sunday and found three new skulls and then on Sunday night Dad heard out about something amazing that would be worth exploring, so we went back again today. This post is about those two walks and what we found.

How not to identify bones

About three weeks ago Kristina Kilgrove wrote on her blog about a human skeleton that had ben laid out wrong with the legs swapped over and back to front. It was a fun post to try and spot all the mistakes.

On Friday Dad showed me a load of photographs he has spotted on a stock library called Shutterstock. When you sell photographs it is important to always say what the photographs are of, but this photographer called "Wallenrock" seems to know nothing about bones and had made some huge mistakes. In the picture above they said it was a "Composition with butterfly at hook, skull and umbrella", but the bone they showed wasn't even a skull: it was a vertebra (neck bone) from an animal like a sheep or a deer.

When I looked further I found lots of other mistakes as well.

Strange bones #9: a horribly broken bone

There is a wood on a moor near my house which I started exploring last year. It is difficult to get to, because you need to cross a field, go down into a steep valley cross a stream and up the other side. The wood is on a steep hill, and some of the ground is very wet and soggy making it difficult to get through.  The good thing about this wood is that it has lots and lots of bones in it, no-one goes there apart from me and dad, and it is where I saw my first crossbill.

This week I am going to write about a bone that dad found there last year. It is very weird, and unlike any other bone I have seen.