Exploring the Secret Vault

Today, Dad and I went back up to the Secret Vault. It is a secret underground chamber in the middle of a wood that we found by accident ages ago. When we first found it I was on a walk with Mum and Dad and I could see bones at the bottom of it, but we couldn't reach them. I thought one of the bones was human.



One day after school in the summer, Dad and I went back with a rope to explore it. When I went inside it was dark but it had loads of cool bones on the floor. Some of them were brown as if they had been in the mud for a long time. Some of them were new bones that I hadn't found before. Here's a picture of the floor of the vault:



At the time we didn't know why all these bones were in the vault, but we thought maybe some of the animals had fallen in and got trapped. But there were other animals like birds that could have just flown out, land other big animals like roe deer that were too big to just fall in. Then one day we met a gamekeeper in another wood, and he told us it might have been a gamekeeper's pit, where the gamekeeper put dead animals to bury, and to attract foxes, so he could trap the foxes.

We found bones of roe deer, pheasants, rabbits, as well as these cool ones:



This is a buzzard skull. I'd found one before, and when I had two I gave the other one to my friend Innes. The skull is quite big for a bird, and has a beak that curves down. There are lots of buzzards round where I live and two red kite nests as well.



The squirrel skull looks like a rabbit skull but it is smaller and a different shape. I'm not sure whether it's a red or a grey squirrel, but I think it's a red as there are only red squirrels around the village. Grey squirrel skulls look bigger than red squirrel skulls.



The swan bones and skulls were the coolest thing I found in the vault. They are just like a duck, but bigger. I found two in the vault. One was broken, and we didn't realise it was a swan until later. My first blog post was about this skull. The bone that I thought was a human bone was actually from a swan wing. But it could have been human. It was longer than my arm or my leg bones:



The coolest thing about this bone is that at one end you can see inside it. Bird bones have to be light but strong, so they can't just be solid bone. So bird bones have got lots of little bits of bone inside them like cobwebs to help keep them strong.

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