A surprise box from Alaska

It has been extremely wintery here in Scotland for the last few days. Earlier in the week we had six inches of snow overnight: then the next day, we had double that, followed by a storm Even the pine marten's nest was destroyed in a storm last week (luckily the pine marten is okay though, here's a video of it yesterday !).

Many animals are really adapted for living in cold climates, and it doesn't get much colder than Alaska, one of the US states which is up besides Canada. A very kind man called Mr McDonough who works for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game contacted me last summer, asking me if I was interested in any skulls from his area. All of the skulls he suggested were amazing, like a moose and a coyote, but there were practical (and legal !) difficulties with such a big gift. Then this box arrived - read on to see what was inside !

A gruesome find and a new mystery

  

Warning: Most of the posts I write are suitable for young children, but this one is slightly more gruesome and sad, so parents of younger children might want to read this first, since it raises other issues they might not have discussed with them yet.

The wood where this week's story took place is a wood that I would not usually look for bones. Unlike the huge dark pine forests with earth floors where I normally look for bones, this one  is a thin strip of deciduous trees (the leaves fall off, unlike pine trees) where grass grows. Open woods like this are more difficult to find bones, partly because they don't offer much protection to animals like deer, and also because if an animal dies there, the grass and leaves quickly cover up their skeletons

 But the reason that I was in this wood was because I had left my trail cam there for the past week to see what animals passed through there. Dad and I walked up there an hour before sunset to see what had been recorded, but I ended up finding something completely unexpected.

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 !

Exhuming the buzzard skeleton

I've written a lot about my badger body recently, but it wasn't the only animal that I had left in Mortuary Wood. Last May one of my friends' granddad brought me a freshly dead buzzard which he found on his farm just outside the village. I left it with the badger, but instead of wrapping it in wire mesh, I used tights so I could keep all the small bones together. I name my skeletons alphabetically, so this one is called Flappy Bird.

The badger body took a very long time to decompose, partly because badgers are tough animals, and also because they have very tough thick skin. I moved the buzzard at the same time as the badger, when the winds blew over trees and exposed my hiding place, but I didn't get a chance to look at it until half term when my mum was at work. I brought in the body, and this is what I found when I opened it up !

Cleaning the badger's skeleton

Last week I wrote about the road kill badger (I've named it Emily) that I had to collect right after the storm. I prefer to leave bodies for a long time until there is no soft tissue left, but I had to collect this one before it had fully decomposed because the spot I'd picked for it had been disturbed.

I cleaned the bones over four days. I've written about cleaning bones before (and wrote a big guide to it here) but I used slightly different methods for this one. This is how I did it !

Cleaning a mummified fox skull.

This is really a story about two things - about cleaning a skull and about the amazing lady who gave it to me. At the end of August I came home from a day at my new school to find a lady, called Miss Ford, who I didn't know, was at my house. It was a big surprise !

She said that she read about me in the Telegraph Magazine in February, and she wanted to give some skulls to me. She only knew the village where I lived, so she had driven up from England and asked at my old primary school in my village, who phoned my home, and luckily my dad was in and invited her over.

The roe buck with the odd missing teeth

Last weekend I went out walking in Quoiggs wood as a present for someone called Darren. He was from Malaysia and he had emailed me asking if I would like a tree shrew skull as a present, then he sent through a whole load of amazing stuff that I'm going to write about later.  To say thanks I offered to send him a roe deer but when I looked in my spares box there wasn't one there, so I went out specially to Quoiggs Wood where I knew there were a few roe deer skeletons.

There were two roe skeletons, but the one I picked had both lower jaws. It was lying with the spine almost as it died, with its head lying at the edge of a stream. The legs were scattered a little bit further apart having been pulled apart by foxes:

The bones that took two-and-a-half years to clean

Out of all the bones I have had, this one has been the longest to write about ! Above are the bones a week or so ago (and an atlas bone from a seal as well !) but it took two-and-a-half years to get them like this. These bones are so interesting that I have written three posts about what I did and what I found.

When I was in Northern Ireland in April 2010 Granddad said he had found something. He asked if I was interested in some dog bones. I said definitely yes, so we went in the car together and then walked into a deserted field. He showed me where it was. It was underneath a hay bale, and I thought it would just be bones, but it was mummified which is not the prettiest thing to see. That's why the next picture you need to click on it and hold down to see it properly, and don't do it while you're eating your dinner !

My brilliant new clever invention for cleaning bones

For ages I have been thinking of a better way of cleaning bones with biological washing powder. I have been using biological washing powder to clean for almost two years now after it was recommended when I visited Perth Museum. I wrote more about it in my complete guide to cleaning bones, but the way it works is it contains enzymes which eat away and dissolve fat. 

Up until now the way now I have been putting the bones to be cleaned in a plastic container, adding the biological powder, then adding hot (not boiling) water then leaving it for a while, then adding a new lot of hot water and powder. The problem is that when the water cools it doesn't clean as well so it takes lots of changes of water.

So I have been thinking for ages for a way to do it easier, where it's nice and clean, and it heats itself. Then two weeks ago I was at a nearly-new sale with my family and Dad saw this and wondered if it might work....

I have written a totally new 'cleaning bones' section !

Back in 2009 I wrote a post about how to clean animal bones. It has been one of my most successful posts ever with lots and lots and lots of visitors, over fifty comments so far, and I get about three or four emails a week just asking for advice on cleaning bones. But it's three years old and I've learnt a lot more since then, so it's a bit outdated.

I'm on half term at the moment so I spent the day completely writing a new guide which has almost everything I know about cleaning bones. You can read it here or by clicking the "cleaning bones" tab at the top of every page. Hope you like it !

The ancient horse jaw

Near the end of last year I went on a walk up to The Pheasant Woods which are on the other side of the river to the village. The Pheasant Woods are a collection of six or seven small woods and four lakes which used to be part of a big country estate. The country house was knocked down years ago but the ice houses and some other buildings are still there. It's a great place to find bones and watch roe deer and buzzards but I've explored it so much I don't often go there any more.

This time I went up in the afternoon and I was walking around and then I found this on the ground. It was very well camouflaged that I thought it was a big bit of tree bark. When I picked it up I realised it was a big jaw and I thought it was off a cow. I spent about two hours searching for the rest of the skull and skeleton but never found them.

The buzzard with the broken neck

Last week I wrote about corvids, which are the family of birds that have crows, magpies and things like that. This week I am going to write about a bird whose skull I have that I think was killed by corvids.

A few months ago, Dad was walking back home through Cat Skull Wood, which is the wood in the Pheasant Woods where I found my cat skull. In a small clearing at the edge of the wood he found this skeleton:

Digging up the fox and the grey squirrel

At the end of last September, I buried a fox and a squirrel that I had been given by a gamekeeper. (I buried because I wanted to get them rotted down but I now know the best way is to leave them above ground.) Yesterday morning, I went back to dig them up.

Finding owl pellets

Last week Dad and I went to explore some new woods a few miles from my house. They were so cool we went back exploring there today. We've seen tons of roe deer, loads of roe deer bones and skulls, a fox skull, a real fox, some hares and some grouse. But one of the best things we found looked like this:

My young roe deer skull

Last winter was very cold here with lots of snow for months. Snow is bad for deer here since the cold can kill them off, and the snow can cover up the food that they eat. After the winter was over, we found about five roe deer skeletons in the Pheasant Woods. One of them was where this skull came from:

The perfect sheep skull

At the start of the year I wrote a post about the five skulls I would like to find this year. One of them was a perfect sheep skull, with both horns and both jaws. I have found loads of sheep skulls before, but none with all five parts. I found a great sheep skull on Sheriffmuir, but one on the jaws and one of the horns was missing. I've found three sheep skulls which have lower jaws, but which were female or didn't have horns. And the closest I came was this skull which I called Montferno from Titus Well Moor which had both horns but only one of the jaws.

The sheep skeleton that won't rot

In June, I wrote about searching a deserted farm where I found a sheep's body that had got stuck in a fence. Because it wasn't rotted down I left it for a bit. But every time we've checked it's still the same !

Normally when a body rots the bones fall apart. This sheep's body is still all stuck together by the bits of flesh that held the bones together.

How I cleaned up my fallow deer skull

I finished cleaning up my fantastic fallow deer skull about a month ago but I've had tons to write about here so this is the first time I've written about it.

The fallow deer head was given to me as a present by a gamekeeper. We don't have fallow deer near my village but he shot it at his last job.

Cleaning the seven point red deer skull

This is the cleaned-up red deer skull that I found in Dougal's Cairn wood when I was walking with mum. It was partly buried in the ground, which is why it looked filthy and dirty when I first found it.

Digging up the hedgehog

Two months ago, I wrote about when Dad brought a hedgehog home that he had found on the road and thought was a bit sick. We put in in a warm box and gave it food and water but it still died.