Identifying the mystery goose

This is the goose skeleton we found last month in a field next to the Pheasant Woods. About a half a mile from where we found it are some lochs where geese come from other countries to stay during the winter.

My new baby brother !

Today I have a new baby brother ! He is called Samuel, and I love him very much. He was born at lunchtime, and after school Grandma and Grandad took me to the hospital to see him. I think he is cute and I am going to be a best friend to him and look after him.

Winter birds in my garden

This winter has been very, very snowy and cold. At the start of this month it was so snowy that my village was cut off, and there was no electricity. That means that more birds came to our birdtable to get food, and a lot of the birds were different to the birds that normally come. (I wrote about the birds I usually see here). All the birds I'm writing here were special birds that I hadn't seen before.

Was Charlie a buck or a doe ?

This is the roe deer skeleton that I found in January in the wood near Gleneagles. We found the pelvis, one entire leg, some broken ribs, and most of the spine, and we called this skeleton Charlie, because we didn't know whether it was a buck (male) or a doe (female). Normally deer skeletons are easy to work out if you have the skull, because only the male deer have antlers (unless you're a reindeer, but we don't have those in Scotland). But we didn't have Charlie's skull, so we didn't know.

Then two weeks ago I got an email from Debby, an assistant professor from America. Her daughter was about the same age as me and she had found a deer pelvis, and she wanted to know if we knew whether you could tell the difference between male and female deer pelvises. I didn't, and Daddy didn't either but we sent her pictures of the pelvises where we knew whether it was a male or female.

The dead buzzard

This is a dead buzzard I found in the Pheasant Woods today. Dad and I had been watching a family of roe deer from our favourite watching place, and we found the buzzard a bit further down the valley under some trees.