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 But it's three years old and I've learnt a lot more since then, so it's a bit outdated.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 !

Woodpeckers, seals and other things I saw this week

For most of this week I've been on holiday in Skye, and I came back on Friday. This week has been great for seeing lots of wildlife. I have already written about seeing the white-tailed sea eagles but here are some of the other things I saw there and at home since I came back.

One of the most amazing things about Skye was how many stars you could see. On the second night Dad was leaving out the rubbish and then he called me out to see the sky. You could see so much because there were no clouds or streetlights and we were in the middle of nowhere. This is how it looked:

Seeing white-tailed sea eagles on the Isle of Skye

This week I've been on holiday in the Isle of Skye. Skye is an island to the north west of Scotland and it's about 55 miles tall and about 25 miles wide. Skye has amazing views, some great mountains and some incredible wildlife, including golden eagles, seals, otters and sea eagles (white-tailed eagles).

White-tailed sea eagles are the fourth biggest raptor in the world, and the rarest raptor in the UK. There are eleven breeding pairs in Skye. They are rare because they were once hunted almost to extinction (like red kites) and they have been reintroduced. They mainly hunt at the coasts but there is one which nests in Fife which my local gamekeeper has seen near my village, which is about 50 miles inland.

Did this red deer calf die last winter ?

This weekend I am at my uncle's wedding, so I am going to write about a walk that I did last weekend. Dad and I went up to Suicides Graves where we have been doing lots of stalking the red deer and hoping to spot stags that come into the woods for the rut. We saw four groups of red deer (and a red kite) but the most interesting thing was not alive at all.

We had worked all the way through the wood to a clearing at the south-west corner of the wood when I spotted some bones at the edge of the wood next to the clearing. They were the bones of a young  red deer hind (female) and they were scattered about as if foxes had pulled the body apart.

I need your help for two future blog posts !

I'm preparing two special blog posts for a month or so's time, and I need your help !

One is going to be about my ten favourite websites for bone collectors. I know what my ten favourite websites are, but are there any I have missed ? What are your favourite websites ?

I would like to do another post about other amateur bone collectors like me and what their favourite bone or skull in their collection is. I got the idea from a thing that Ben Garrod did on his Ben's Bones Facebook page (I came second with my leopard skull). If you are a bone collector, what's your favourite skull ?

Leave a message in the comments below, or email me at jakesbones@gmail.com !

PS. I have just realised this is my 200th blog post ! Hurrah for me !

The geese have started to arrive at Carsebreck !

Last Sunday me and dad went up on a walk on the moors near my house to explore an old abandoned quarry which used to produce millstones 150 years ago. We parked the car on a road nearby, and we we were walking up the hill when we spotted all these birds in the fields opposite. There seemed to be hundred of them all resting in the fields, most of them in one big group. This is really unusual but I worked out what was going on. This is a photograph of just one small part of the main group I saw:

My muntjac deer skull

There are six types of deer in the UK: roe deer, red deer, fallow, sika, Chinese water deer and muntjac. There are lots of deer around my village, but they are all red and roe deer, so it is hard for me to find a skull of the other types. I was lucky that I got my fallow buck skull from the gamekeeper in my village, but I didn't know how to get sika, Chinese water deer or muntjac.

Then in April I got a message through my Facebook fan page from Miss Bowen Hill who lives in Essex in England. She said her dog had found a muntjac skull and was I interested ? I said yes, definitely and she kindly sent it to me !

Stop the cull: sign the petition to save the badgers

This is a short post but it's about something I feel strongly about and I want you to support it too.

This week the Badger Trust lost a court case to stop the government killing badgers. The government want to shoot wild badgers to stop the spread of a disease called bovine tuberculosis, which means thousands of cows every year have to be killed.

I don't have a problem with animals being shot to protect the countryside, and it happens to foxes, rabbits and deer. But there is absolutely no scientific evidence that shooting badgers will protect cows from bovine TB, and it might even make things worse. Shooting badgers for no reason is just stupid.

It would happen only in England. In Wales they are planning to vaccinate (give a medical injection to) badgers. It won't affect anything in Scotland, where I live. That doesn't mean I shouldn't care about it.

There is a very good piece about it on the Huffington Post. You can read more about it at the RSPCA website, and also at the Just Do Something website, and also here and here.

You can show your support by signing this petition (over 15,500 signatures so far) or the one at 38 degrees (over 62,000 !), or email your MP and the Prime Minister about it at the RSPCA website. Do it now !

Researching Ardoch House at RCAHMS

Two weeks ago I wrote about Ardoch House, which was an old country house in my village which was built over 200 years ago but which vanished in the mid 1980s. A man called Mr Forbes from Canada had emailed me telling me about the house, how he explored it in the 1980s and how an old ancestor of his used to work there.

I did a lot of research online, and one of the websites I used was the Canmore database which is run by RCAHMS who are the Royal Commission for Ancient and Historial Monuments  of Scotland. They keep all the records of old buildings, some of which you can see online but some of which you have to  go to their offices in Edinburgh to see.  About a month ago, during the summer holidays, I went with dad to see the photos they had of Ardoch House.

The archeological bones, part 2: the teeth

Two weeks ago I started writing about a box of archeological bones I had been given as a present by someone who was moving to another country. This week I am going to write about the teeth in the box.   There were more teeth in the box than any other type of bone, perhaps because teeth last longer than bone. Some were still in fragments of jaw, and others were just loose by themselves.

You can tell a lot from teeth. They can tell you what type of things it ate, how big it was, how old it was, and sometimes what animal it was. I am really good with red and roe deer teeth because I have absolutely tons of them, but this was more of a puzzle because there were lots of different teeth some of which I had never seen before. It was also harder because when teeth are in a jaw it's easier to tell whether they are molars or pre-molars which are the two types of cheek teeth in animals.