Today I was filmed for BBC Autumnwatch !

For the last week I have been keeping a big secret, but now I can tell everyone. I am going to be on one of the BBC Autumnwatch Live programmes ! It was filmed today at my house with the main presenter Chris Packham.

One of the Autumnwatch producers emailed me about three weeks ago asking if I wanted to go on and asking me a bit more about my bone collection. Then last week it was decided that it was definitely going to happen. This morning when I woke up I felt really nervous and excited. I was excited because it is exciting to go on TV but I was nervous because it can be difficult and scary getting filmed. Last night I sent a message on Twitter to Chris Packham and he replied and said nice things about my blog so that helped too. 

I now have 100 skulls in my room !

This is an extra long post but I think you will like it. This week I reorganized all the bones in my room and got an amazing surprise. Dad added even more shelves so I could put even more skulls out.  This next picture is what my room looks like if you take a photo all around (click for a bigger one)

The best bone museum in the world ?

This week I've been in Paris with my mum, dad and baby brother Sam. While I was there there was a museum I  had heard about and really wanted to see. It is called the Galerie de paléontologie et d'anatomie comparée and it is part of the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle (National Museum of Natural History).

Vulpy, the fox skeleton

This week I'm going to write about my fox skeleton which I've called Vulpy. (All my skeletons have alphabetical names and I'm up to Y so far). This fox was given to me by a gamekeeper in my village, and last September I buried it by the Secret Lake. Last month I dug it up, brought it home and left the bones to clean in biological washing powder.

How to tell red and roe deer apart

There are six types of deer that live in the wild in the UK. They are roe deer, red deer, fallow deer, sika deer, muntjac deer and Chinese water deer. The two types that live around my village are red and roe deer, and these are the only two types of deer that have always lived in Britain.

When I first started going on walks, I thought it was a bit difficult to tell which was red and roe deer, but once you know how to tell the difference, it gets really easy. This is how to tell them apart.

How roe deer antlers grow

This is a roe buck that we saw this week in the Secret Lake Wood. In the last few weeks, we've been seeing roe deer with their full antlers out.

Strange bones #4 - the broken deer leg

This might be one of the coolest bones I have.




I found it in a private deer wood just a few miles from my village, and there's probably not another bone like it. That's because it's three broken bones that have been healed together. It's from the front left leg of an adult red deer. Here's it next to the front leg bone from Alice, the year-old red deer hind whose skeleton we found a few months back.

How I clean up animal bones

Important: This blog post from 2009 is now out of date because I have written a much bigger and better post about everything I know about cleaning bones from five years of bone collecting. You can read it by clicking here or by clicking on the "Cleaning bones" tab at the top of every page.

Most of bones I collect are mostly clean already, because all the flesh has been eaten off them already by animals and bugs. But they all need cleaning up a little bit, and this is how I do it. This is how I cleaned up the skeleton of the red deer that I found here.

Starting off



After I brought back the bones, I put them in a bucket to store them. This is about half of them. All together, the bones filled this bucket. There were 157 bone parts in all.

Putting a partial roe deer skeleton back together

Daddy and I were planning to go on a deer stalking walk today, but it was raining, so Daddy said maybe I could put one of my old deer skeletons together. I was going to do a baby roe deer skeleton, but we couldn't find all the spine bones, so we did this adult roe deer instead (we call it Eddie).

While put the bones back together in the right order, Daddy set up of his cameras to take a picture every few seconds. When we put all the pictures together it looked like this:



You can see how I sorted out the bones. There were 66 bones for this roe deer, which seems like a lot, but it's not a complete skeleton, and most of these were the ribs and vertabrae. When we found the skeleton, most of the front legs were missing, and there are other bones, like the toes, which we brought back but must have put in a different box. I started with the spine first, putting a wire through the bones so they all stayed together in the right order.

Putting a fox skeleton back together

Important: Are you looking for a step-by-step guide on how to put a fox skeleton back together ? If so, I wrote this guide in January 2013 which is more help than this page.

I used to think that if I found an animal skeleton all the bones would be in the right order. But in most of the skeletons I've found the bones are all jumbled up, and often bones are missing. That means that if we want to know more about the animal, we have to try to put the pieces back together. Here are bones of a fox that I collected. When I put names to my skeletons, I called this one Harry. I found the skull first of all, then we looked harder, and we found some other bones which were buried beside it.



Here are the bones we found. You can see they were all jumbled up when we brought them home. Different types of bones have different shapes, so then we begin sorting them out. Even though we this was the first fox skeleton we brought back, we could see that a lot of the bones were just the same as a deer or a rabbit. We began by sorting them into different piles.