The mystery of red/blue 57

I've written before about the odd things I find in the countryside when I'm searching for bones, like 150 year old pottery, old poison bottles or metal propellors and cow hooves.  This week's post is about finding something that will be obvious to some, but will need explaining to others.

These two tags were up on a part of the estate near my village, up close to the castle. It's partly woodland, partly scrub clearings and partly an old fishing lake, and it's petty much unexplored and deserted. More importantly, there are a few red deer down here, as well as roe deer. But when I found these numbered tags, there weren't any deer to be seen - but there was another mystery to be solved.

A week in the woods

As you'll know if you've been reading my blog for a while, I love my trail camera -  a small but durable wildlife cameras that takes video or stills whenever wildlife go by. I've used mine to film pine marten, roe deer, red deer, as well as what was feeding off a roe deer body. Last year I even blogged about everything I learned about using my trail camera.

It's great to have because it shows a lot of unexpected wildlife. When I broke my leg and couldn't walk far, I used to set myself the challenge of sitting in the woods for an hour and recording what I saw. But what could you see if you sat there for a whole week ? Well, just before I went away over Easter, I set up my trail camera in a new wood - and this is what it filmed.

Some deer, two skulls, and a licence plate

There's a wood north of my village which I've passed by twice a day every school day for the last year and a half. It's about a mile long, but I never thought of exploring it, until last autumn when dad thought there may be otters. He went to look for sign sof them - but found lots of red deer markings instead. I left the trail camera there to film the red deer, then at the start of December, a roe deer died close to where the camera was, and it's been filming there ever since.

So I know lots about what is in the wood from the trail cam footage, but I hadn't explored it properly, so last Saturday I decided to explore the wood in more detail to see if I could see any animal signs or find more bones - and this is what I found !

Searching for the red deer rut

The rut is the one most amazing wildlife events in Britain. It is when the red deer stags (males) round up the female red deer (hinds) for mating, and fight over them with other stags. The stags actually change shape slightly at this time of year and grow a thick neck mane, and you can hear roaring in the woods from miles away.

The rut is also one of the scariest times to be out in the woods when you at in a dark wood at twilight and hear strange roaring from both sides of you, or - and this happened to me yesterday - when you see a huge angry stag roaring and coming towards you, armed with a massive set of 10-point antlers. Read on if you want to know what happened next !

The three skeleton mystery

This week's post is about age indicators on bones. Telling an animal's age can be easy when they are young, because there are lots of indicators with teeth (like my one), bone size and unfused bones, but the exact age of adult skeletons can be very difficult to say exactly. Even for deer, where I have lots of comparative skulls, teeth wear at different rates whether the deer eats grass or heather, so generally you can only say whether a deer is "very young", "juvenile", "adult" or "old" rather than a precise age.

But this week's post is a mystery too, and I'm hoping some experts have some ideas. If you're in a rush, just go down to the very end of the post, where I put the question I would like ideas about !

Tracking red deer with my trail camera

As you'll know if you follow my blog, I bought a trail camera last year, and since last November I have been tracking a pine marten that lived in a wood on the moors above my house.While I managed to get  some really good footage of him, I seemed to be getting fewer and fewer clips of him, and I wasn't able to track down where he was living either, so at the start of July I decided to try and film something else instead.

Around where I live there are foxes, badgers, stoats, rabbits, roe deer and red squirrels, but I decided to try and film red deer. I thought they might be easy to film because I know where they live, they leave distinct tracks, they tend to move between the same places, and they are very big. So on the 5th July, I moved the camera...and this is what I have discovered since then !

The roe deer of the pine marten wood

I've blogged before about my Bushnell trail camera, which for the last nine months has been filming a nearby wood where a pine marten lives.  Because I have been concentrating on this one, small wood, I've begun to get to know the local wildlife really well, especially with the roe deer who sometimes get filmed on the camera as well. The camera footage is really useful for tracking and identifying the different deer.

Roe deer are one of the most common types of deer here, and are really interesting to watch. Sometimes you see them in large groupings, especially in spring, but they are easier to watch than the red deer, and less aggressive. Here are the roe deer in the group that I have identified, starting with the young fawn I spotted a few weeks ago !

A roe deer birth and a roe deer death

As you know, almost all my time this year has been spent in two woods on the moor near my village, looking for one very small animal: a pine marten ! I've been quite lucky with the filming, but while I've doing that I've been able to have a close look at the other wildlife that lives around there, like the birds, rabbits and roe deer.

Last weekend I was was away camping with the Scouts, but my dad took my two younger brothers up to move my trail camera which had been left for a week watching an owl perch at the very north end of the wood. He wasn't sure where to reposition the camera, so he walked with my brothers down the the south end of the wood. He couldn't think of anywhere to attach the camera, so he just went up to a random tree, but as he did, he noticed something beside a fallen tree branch that he thought was maybe a dead buzzard or owl.

So why do deer even have antlers ?

When I gave my talk a few weeks ago at Crieff Library I talked about deer antlers, and passed round some shed roe deer antlers for people to look at and feel. At the end, someone asked: "why do deer have antlers anyway ?"

It's a simple question but it's also a difficult question at the same time. There are some obvious answers, but when you look into them, they don't apply to all deer. I've written a lot about antlers before (like explaining how roe deer antlers grow,  when the antlers 'go back' and when they grow strangely) but I've never looked into why they have them in the first place before, and the reason is more interesting than you might think !

The three-antlered deer and other cool finds

If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you will know that I've had to be in hospital this week for an emergency appendectomy. (The appendix is a tiny organ whose only purpose in humans is to either do nothing or try to kill you,).  I am out of hospital now and thank you to everyone who left a comment or send me an email.

A week ago, before I went in to hospital, I was out exploring near the pine marten wood. I wanted to see if there were signs of pine martens in the two other woods to the south which are quite isolated. While I didn't find any signs of other pine martens there, I did find a load of other cool bones. Read on to see what I found last week and at other times !

When roe deer antlers "go back"

When my room was being changed with new display cabinets for my bones in the summer, I moved this skull that had been hidden away on a high shelf, back on top of my display cabinet. It is from a roe buck (male) but is different to how you would think it would look. 

Some bone collectors like to have perfect skulls but I like weird or misshapen skulls as much, because they tell a story of the animals life. Here the nose bones have gone, and the antlers are more bent back than all my other roe buck skulls.  When the antlers are in velvet, they are more soft and can bend because it is not getting enough nutrients, but when they are out of velvet the antlers are hard and can't bend. 

The epic battle between Homer and Flanders

For most of the year the red deer stags (males) and hinds and calves (female and kids) live in two separate groups, but in the autumn, the 'rut' begins when red deer stags want to have sex with the females. They split up, go find the females, and get a group of them together, called a harem. The stags then fight with each other for females, and only the biggest and strongest end up with females, so that 80% of each year's calves are fathered by only 20% of the males. (It's a bonkers way to have kids, but it's still better than what salmon have to do.)

For the last few weeks I have been watching my local red deer during the rut, like I did last year. It's difficult to do, because deer are hard to track (I wrote a guide here), and harder to sneak up on. Even so I've seen some great action this autumn !

Visiting the Horniman Museum's stores

This week has been a very special week because I am down in London with my family doing lots of trips and visits. There are three or four different things I want to write about, but to start off with I'm going to write about a very special visit I was really looking forward to where I was going to meet Paolo Viscardi who writes the Zygoma blog and who is a museum curator at the Horniman Museum in south London.

Paolo invited me to visit the Horniman Museum's Study Collections Centre which is like a secret warehouse hidden away in another part of London. I'm not allowed to say where it is because it contains valuable exhibits, and it's not open to the public, so it was very special I was allowed in.

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 ?

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.

Stalking red deer during the rut

Normally the four red deer forests that I explore just have herds of hinds (females). Unlike roe deer, red deer females group together for protection and to raise the calves. But at the end of September red deer stags start to come down into these woods from the moors to the north for the rut. The rut is when the stags round up the hinds to have lots of sex with them, and they will fight other stags to protect their groups of females which is called their harem. It's one of the weirdest ways to have babies but it seems to work for them.

BBC Autumnwatch has been on this week and they have been following the red deer rut on the isle of Rum (which is near Skye where I was last month). Scientists like the red deer there because the red deer are a closed population that can't go anyway, and so are good to study. Autumnwatch filmed some amazing scenes and my story is good but not quite as interesting as theirs.

Strange bones #10 - what is this ?

This is something that is a real mystery - can you help ?

I found this about three weeks ago at the Gleneagles wood (which I wrote about going deer stalking in). We found it under a tree at south east corner of the wood, just by a clearing. When I first saw it I thought it was just a piece of wood and not worth bringing home but dad thought it might be interesting. It's been at home for three weeks now and we still don't know what it is !

The roe deer with three antlers

This week's post is about something I bought on eBay rather than something I found myself. I prefer to find things myself but I saw this and I quite liked it and it's quite unique because you don't often see a roe deer with three antlers.

I really like bones (and antlers) that have grown strange because it makes me the only one in the world with something like that. Some of my favourite bones are a broken front leg, a broken femur, a broken tibia, a red deer with only one antler, a deer with three legs (that I haven't written about yet), and lots of others like the golden eagle with the skull injury and the shotgun pellet hole.

The five skulls I would most like to find in 2012

At the end of every year so far that I have been writing my blog, I have written about the five skulls I hope to collect in the next year. Most of the time I have been really lucky, and I have found them, but there have always been some that I didn't find. It helps me think about what I can collect over the next year, and where I might find them.

Finding new deer bones in the Gleneagles wood

Last weekend, Dad and I went to the Gleneagles wood. It is a dense pine wood with a two really big clearings which has lots of roe deer, buzzards and red squirrels. I have written about it before, but I have hardly been there this year. 

We went in the wood at the north-east corner, and went down the east edge, going quietly in case we saw any deer but we didn't. As we went into the clearing there was a buzzard which was being noisy overhead because we were near its nest. Then we went along the south edge and split up to search for bones as we moved west.