The 150 year old mystery buried in the ground

After  being on Winterwatch last week, I have got a lot more followers on Facebook and Twitter. You are probably expecting me to write about bones, but instead I am going to write about something else very odd which happened as soon as I came back home from the filming.

I brought up my trail cam up to Winterwatch in case I needed a prop when I was talking about filming the pine marten. When I came back, the first thing I did was leave my trail cam back to the area where I have been tracking it trying to find out where it lives. After I set it up, I searched around looking for fresh droppings or other signs, and then I noticed something VERY peculiar underneath the roots of a up-turned tree. I've found weird stuff in the roots of fallen down trees before, like an unexploded world war II bomb or an old cow bone, so it was definitely worth a look !

Behind the scenes at BBC Winterwatch

The last two days have been AMAZING. I have gone from being nervous and slightly scared and excited, travelled over 200 miles, been on live TV (twice), spent a night in a hotel, and met some of my wildlife heroes. That's a pretty incredible two days.

About two weeks ago I was asked if I would like to be on BBC Winterwatch Unsprung, a show which follows the main Winterwatch wildlife programme on the BBC which is the best programme about UK wildlife even though it''s only on for a few days each time. Of course, I said yes ! The only problem was, they asked me to bring up my badger skeleton which wasn't even close to being finished at the time ! So for the last two weeks I've been rushing finishing that. This is what it's like behind the scenes at Winterwatch ! (with a video below !)

Winterwatch, and seven other cool things happening !

Right, I am going to write about the REALLY big news first: you can see me live on BBC2 TV at 9pm on Wednesday night when I will be on Winterwatch Unsprung (straight after the main Winterwatch programme) ! I've been asked to talk about some of my skeletons and bones, I will be meeting Nick Baker (who is the Unsprung presenter and a really good wildlife expert), Chris Packham, Michaela Strachan and Martin Hughes-Games (who are the main presenters, but on they will be on Unsprung too).

If you are not from the UK, BBC Winterwatch/Springwatch/Autunmwatch (which I have been on before) is one of the biggest wildlife TV programmes in the UK. It goes out live from a wildlife reserve in the UK, and this year it is from Mar Lodge in the Cairngorms, which are few hours drive from me. It's on every night this week from Monday to Thursday on BBC2  It will be an amazing experience and I am hoping to write a post to behind the scenes on Thursday ! 

Here are some of the other amazing things that I am looking forward to right now:

The heron that wasn't, and other weird stuff

I originally planned to have this post to be a fun post between Christmas and New Year but I never got round to it. I've been collecting bones for about six years now and in that time I have answered thousands of emails and messages, and been on hundreds of bone-collecting walks.

Most of the time it's interesting, but now and again I get a really funny story. So I've never told any of these stories before (apart from one I said in an interview recently). So because this week has been so busy (can't say why yet !) I'm going write about some of the funny stuff that has happened to me.

Rebuilding the skull of Emily the badger

This is the fifth post that I have written about my badger skeleton, Emily, who I found as a roadkill near my village. I left to decompose in Mortuary wood, checked her again in August, then finally had to collect her in December after a bad storm blew down the wood where she was hidden, before cleaning her.  This week I am going to talk about the skull and putting it back together again.   

The big surprise when I collected Emily was that although her head looked intact when I found her. Her skull had been massively fractured, as if she was just hit on the chin by a car or lorry when she stepped out to cross the road. When I first found her, I wasn't even sure if I could ever repair her skull, but I've done the best I can, and even though it's not perfect, I'm quite proud of how she looks.

15 things I've learned in 2013

It is a real pleasure writing this blog and replying to the hundreds of people who email me. I reckon I must have spent about six or seven hours every week either exploring, walking, finding and preparing bones, and writing posts, which is pretty amazing if you think about it.

At the end of every year that I have written on this blog I do a review of the year, so this one is my fifth one. This year has been tough at times but also fun.  Here are the fifteen things I have learned this year:

Happy Christmas everyone !

Happy Christmas everyone ! I don't think we'll get snow like this here in Scotland (this was from earlier in the year) but I hope you all have a lovely Christmas with friends and family and get everything you ask for.

I'll do my final blog post of the year in a week's time, when I'll do a roundup of what 2013 has meant to me.

Cleaning the badger's skeleton

Last week I wrote about the road kill badger (I've named it Emily) that I had to collect right after the storm. I prefer to leave bodies for a long time until there is no soft tissue left, but I had to collect this one before it had fully decomposed because the spot I'd picked for it had been disturbed.

I cleaned the bones over four days. I've written about cleaning bones before (and wrote a big guide to it here) but I used slightly different methods for this one. This is how I did it !

Rescuing the badger body after the storm

I ended last week's post by worrying about the big storm we had in the UK (100mph near us !) and whether it had damaged the wood where my trail camera was. That wood is on top of a great moor, and you can see for about 20 miles in three of the four directions, so it was quite exposed. It turned out that wood was hardly damaged at all, but another wood was damaged that was important to me !

I call that wood "The Mortuary Wood", and it is where I left the badger and the buzzard bodies to decompose.  It is for away enough away from houses so people cannot smell the decomposition smell  but is close enough to the road so it's easy to bring the bodies in and keep checking on them. I went up on Saturday morning to check on the bodies and I was shocked by what I found !

A month of filming a pine marten

Pine martens are kind of amazing. They are rare, hard to spot, cute, and tough. It never even occurred to be that there might be some nearby, and I only found out about it by using my trail camera (which I wrote about before here).

This is quite a long post, but I thought it was best to talk through all the stages I went through, and all the failures and all the successes. I know there are a lot of naturalists in the UK who would really like to film a pine marten too, so I hope this helps. There are a lot of videos but they are mostly very short. If you love nature, you HAVE to read this post !