A new cub scout badge !

Here's a picture of me with my new cub scout hobby badge, which I got for my bone collecting. Cool !

Two small jaw bones

I've got two jaw bones from small animals to clean up. The top one I found in a wood while on a walk with mum and dad, and I think it is a squirrel jaw, but I'm not sure.

The other one I think is from a hedgehog. My friend Holly found it on the road which goes up to the castle in the village. One night my dad and I were coming out of a wood late at night and we found a hedgehog. My dad picked it up in his hat so we wouldn't get spiked. It was cool and I wanted to keep it as a pet but daddy said no. If I had a pet fox, I'd call it Guy Fox.

The cleaned up six-point red deer skull

Here's the six point red deer skull that we found back here. At the start, this skull was really really dirty because it was buried under the ground with only one antler sticking out. It took us weeks to clean up, but it was worth it. Dad's put woodstain on the antlers, and it now hangs on my shed, next to two other red stag skulls.

Loads of deer bones from the walk today

Today I went on a bone walk with my friend Alabama, her brother Jackson, her dad and my dad. I was leading the walk because Ali and Jackson hadn't been on this kind of walk before. We went through a part of the wood that I knew very well, and where we'd seen lots of red deer before.

How I clean up animal bones

Important: This blog post from 2009 is now out of date because I have written a much bigger and better post about everything I know about cleaning bones from five years of bone collecting. You can read it by clicking here or by clicking on the "Cleaning bones" tab at the top of every page.

Most of bones I collect are mostly clean already, because all the flesh has been eaten off them already by animals and bugs. But they all need cleaning up a little bit, and this is how I do it. This is how I cleaned up the skeleton of the red deer that I found here.

Starting off



After I brought back the bones, I put them in a bucket to store them. This is about half of them. All together, the bones filled this bucket. There were 157 bone parts in all.

The split roe buck deer skull

The splitroe buck skull has been in the peroxide for a week (together with the young red deer). The peroxide cleans up the bone and makes it white. I was careful to only put it in the peroxide up to its antlers so they didn't go white. Here's what it looked like when in the peroxide.