What I'm working on at the moment

I've been really lucky on walks recently, and have a load of new bones to work on. Here are some of the ones I've found in the last month or so.

Sheep skull

I wrote about finding this here.

I've cleaned up the sheep skull, and it now is on my shelves in my room. I'm going to write more about it later. I never found the other horn or the other part of the jaw, which is a shame, even though Daddy went back to try and find them. It would have been great if we had all the bits. But it's still the best sheep skull I have, and I have four.

---

Three new deer skulls

This is me and my friend Innes this evening coming out of one of my favourite woods, where there are roe and red deer. We found a roe deer buck skull with six points (I'm holding that), a red deer stag skull with very soft antlers (Innes is holding that), and a red deer stag skull with four points on one antler and two on the other, which you can't see because my daddy was holding it and he was taking the picture. Most of the six-pointer was buried and we had to dig out of the ground and it took my daddy ages.

We have to share the skulls but we haven't decided who is having which ones yet.

A dead fox in my village

Today, we found this dead fox by the side of the main road that goes through my village. We think it must have been hit by a car.



I love foxes. Farmers don't like foxes, and I can see why, because they kill the farmer's animals like chickens and lambs, but I still think they are lovely creatures.

How we found the bones of four young red deer

What you can see in the picture above is a red deer skeleton that we found on a walk last night. (We've called it Alice). We know it's a young female, but we still have to do a proper look at the bones. There are 157 bone pieces altogether, but some of those are from big bones that are broken, and some of those are tops and bottoms of bones that in older deer are joined together.

Two walks and some new bones

This week the weather has been better, so after school I have been on two bone walks again. Two days ago I went a bone walk to Tam Breck wood with daddy. My dad saw a roe buck but it ran away fast do I didn't see it, and further on we saw two roe in the fields. Then we found this rabbit skull.




The first bones I collected were rabbit bones, and I still collect them if they're good enough. I have about ten rabbit skulls, and it's really easy to find lots of them, but not many are in good condition like this with all the teeth, the nose bones, and the brain case. That's because whatever kills them, like a fox, often bites the skull as well.

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.