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.






There were lots of rabbit skeletons around there. Here is one that is interesting because you can see all the bones in the right order, with the back legs, the pelvis, the spine and even some of the ribs. We didn't bring this one back, though.




At the edge of a lake nearby we found this. It looks like a duck but might be a goose. We took the head, because it was already rotted and mainly bones, even though we already have a duck skull and a goose skull.




Here is another skull we found and took It is old and very bashed but still has the black bit of skin that covers the bill. We're not sure what it is yet. This website says the only skull about that size is from a Tundra Bean Goose, but that has an orange bill, not a black one, and I don't think it comes to this part of Scotland. Maybe it's another type of skull, but is a baby, so it's smaller.



On Friday, after school, Daddy, Mummy, me and my friend Innes went to another wood, which has red deer in it. We met a gamekeeper who told us that he was about to hunt some deer in one part of the wood, so we agreed to go to another part. When we were deer spotting, we saw a big red hind with a fawn that was really small in the forest. We also found two really interesting skulls.

This is a red deer stag skull. It is interesting because it has an extra top tooth, sort of inbetween the three premolars and the three back molars. I don't know how it happened like that.





There are three reasons why this next skull is interesting. Mainly, it only has one antler. The antler is as big as a five or six-pointer would be, but it doesn't have any branches or tines. That means the antler has grown wrong. That sometimes happens with some deer. The gamekeeper saw this skull and said that it sometime happens in old deer. I think it wasn't that old because the teeth were still sharp.

The last reason it has only one antler is because I maybe think it only ever had one antler and never had two antlers because one of the pedicles (the bit of the skull that the antlers grow from) wasn't there, or maybe it was broken.




It's hard to see because the skull is dirty and has got moss on it, but we brought it home to clean up and have a closer look. I'm going to keep this skull, and my friend Innes is going to keep the one with the extra tooth.

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