The pony skull I bought for £1

I was hoping to write about the Times magazine feature on kid bloggers today, but it isn't in the magazine today so it must be in  next week. So instead I'm writing about this which is the pony skull I bought about a month ago on eBay.

I don't buy a lot of skulls on eBay but this one was special and a real bargain. Only one other person was bidding on it. I was prepared to pay £10 but I only had to pay £1.04 and about £5 postage.

Strange bones #11: The buzzard skull that wasn't

On Tuesday me and Dad went on a walk in Suicides Graves wood. First of all we went down to the south-east corner where there is sometimes a herd of red deer, but although we saw lots of tracks, we didn't see any deer. Then we worked west through the wood, following red deer tracks and paths, and looking for bones.

We found a lot of bones, including something that was either a lamb or a red deer calf, but nothing worth bringing back. That was until we were at the edge of a clearing when dad spotted this at his feet. We searched around but couldn't find any other bones near it.

Where can you find animal bones ?

This is one of the things that I have been meaning to do for ages. The question I am most often asked in emails is where do I find all my animal bones ? I don't really have any big secrets. I am lucky where I live because there are lots of animals, and I do lots of walks. Sometimes on the walks I find lots of bones and sometimes I find none. But here are ways to find bones for some of the animals in the UK.

My pipistrelle bat skeleton and my first licence

This is a story about my first bone licence. For collecting most bones you don't need a licence at all, and  if you find something you can usually keep it without asking as long as they weren't killed illegally. Some types are animals you do need a licence for because they are protected in some way.

The types of animals that you need licenses for are different from what you might think, and the law is complicated. I did a lot of research this year so I knew for sure that I didn't need a licence for my golden eagle skull, but I did have to check with Scottish Natural Heritage and DEFRA, and I have to keep information about where it came from and how it died. When I was talking to Scottish Natural Heritage about the golden eagle, they told me I did need a licence for another skeleton. It was one I wasn't expecting. It was my pipistrelle bat skeleton !

I've changed my blog address !

Did you notice I've changed my blog address ? From now on, my blog is at www.jakes-bones.com which is simpler than the old jakes-bones.blogspot.com address, although that one will still work too.

Everything should work with the new address now, but if you notice anything broken, let me know !

The amazing thing the stoat did

I was going to write about something else this week, until something really interesting happened on the walk today. It took less than four minutes but it was something I have never seen before. It was a miserable walk because it was raining a lot, and we had to change socks half way through. It had been raining so far that the stream we were going to cross was too wide, and we had to go around. On the drive back from the moor dad stopped the car to check a dead corvid by the side of the road. Then he looked in the rear view mirror and he saw what he thought were some baby rabbits and a stoat playing on the road !

The puzzle of the three-legged deer

This might look like a boring collection of bones to you, but it shows something quite strange. These are bones I have known about for a while. I first wrote about the red deer body in May 2010 (the picture is the big one under "the three dead red deer") and it wasn't until a year later that I noticed something strange about the bones and collected them. I called this collection "Yvette" because it was the 25th set of bones and I name them alphabetically.

My kangaroo skull

This is a skull I have had for a while but I haven't got round to writing about it until now. It was a special gift from one of dad's friend's Sarah who lives in the other Perth, the one in Australia. She sent me a package of something she had found by the side of the road, and she knew it was a kangaroo but not exactly what sort. She cleaned it up herself, and sent it through the post. It only took four days to go 15,000km !

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.