Five cool mysteries from yesterday's walk

I'm in the last few weeks of my school holiday (Scottish schools go back earlier than English schools), and yesterday I had planned to explore a new wood high on the moors which needed to start with a steep climb up the hill. But as I set off I could see the rain coming in over the hills, and I knew it was going to be a long, exposed walk to the wood, so instead I decided to go back to Suicides Graves, which is a large red deer wood I've explored many times before.

So dad and I went looking for deer and bones and we took a loop through the wood, starting with the south east edge, moving along the south, then cutting back through the middle of the wood to look for frogs. ( I found loads !) On the walk we found five pretty cool mysteries: can you solve them ? (Click on "Click to see the answer" under each one to reveal what it was !)

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.

The surprise biscuit tin of bones

About a month ago I got a surprise card from the postman to say that he had tried to deliver a parcel to me. I had no idea who it came from, but it was an amazing surprise that showed how kind some people are. There are lots of reasons why this has taken me a month to write this, and one of them is very important and I will write about it more next week. But this week is exciting enough !

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.

A sad story about a hedgehog

On Wednesday when my dad picked me up from cubs he told that someone was coming to the house for a surprise sleep-over. I thought it was one of my friends, but when I got home it was a hedgehog !

My dad had found the hedgehog when he was driving down the back road trying to get my baby brother to sleep. It was on the road, looking sleepy, and he was worried it would get run over. When he picked it up, it didn't go into a ball, so he was worried it was ill and took it home to look after for a night.

Two small jaw bones

I've got two jaw bones from small animals to clean up. The top one I found in a wood while on a walk with mum and dad, and I think it is a squirrel jaw, but I'm not sure.

The other one I think is from a hedgehog. My friend Holly found it on the road which goes up to the castle in the village. One night my dad and I were coming out of a wood late at night and we found a hedgehog. My dad picked it up in his hat so we wouldn't get spiked. It was cool and I wanted to keep it as a pet but daddy said no. If I had a pet fox, I'd call it Guy Fox.