Lots of different birds

I've spotted lots of different birds in different places recently, and this I'm going to write about them all.



↑ This bird looks really cool, maybe a bit like a tropical bird like a parrot. I saw it looking out my hall window into the trees opposite, and there were a whole load of them in a tree. I had to go all the way through my bird book to work out they were waxwings, which come from another country in large groups to eat the berries here. They are so rare here there was even a piece in my local newspaper about them. They have a crest and a yellow tip on the tail.

CSI: Bambi part 1

This is the first of a series of posts about this skeleton.
You can read the second one here.
I haven't written the third one yet !

This week's post is about how I collected a great red deer stag skeleton. On Friday morning, dad and I went up to Suicides Graves wood to collect a skeleton which dad noticed a few weeks before. He brought the skull back to show me, but left the rest.

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.

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.

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.

The red kites at Argaty

Yesterday, me, my mum, my baby brother and my dad went to the red kite centre at Argaty. I like red kites because there are a few nests near my village, but I'm not allowed to say where. In one of my favourite woods you can go and see a pair of red kites flying about and I love watching them.

At the red kite centre at Argaty, you can go and watch the red kites being fed. They only give them a tiny bit of food to make sure the red kites are finding food for themselves. The food they put out is from rabbits and deer, cut into tiny pieces. At 2.30pm we arrived and walked up to a hide, which is like a big shed with lots of flaps on every side where you can sit and watch the birds.

My barn owl skull

I'm doing an extra post this week and next because I'm on half term this week. (The schools in my area get two weeks off this time of year because the children used to help gather the potatoes in the farms.)

This is one of the skulls that Michael the bone collector sent me (together with my amazing badger skull). A badger skull and an owl skull were two of the five skulls that I said I wanted to get this year so it's cool to get them.

Helping to save a buzzard's life

On Tuesday, after school, Mum, Dad, me and my baby brother Sam went on a walk for a nature diary for my school. I had picked a walk in a wood I know really well where I knew I would see tons of wildlife, like red squirrels, roe deer, red kites, buzzards, grey herons, ducks and pheasants. Mum and I went on ahead, and Dad went a different route with Sam in a papoose and said he would meet us to watch the red kites.

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.