Burying a fox and a grey squirrel

This week I got a great surprise present. My friend who is the gamekeeper in the Pheasant Woods came round on Monday to tell me that he had caught a fox and a grey squirrel for me to rot down for their bones. This was brilliant because all my fox skulls don't have the lower jaws, and none of them have all the teeth.

The problem with rotting animals down is the smell, and it takes about two or three months, and other animals can dig them up and spread the bones about. So we used the same plan that we used to rot down the hedgehog. Here is what we used:

My new badger skull

When I had my week of being famous, another bone collector from Scotland called Michael emailed me to say hello. He has 1,000 skulls including a giraffe skull !

Michael asked if I wanted to swap skulls because he didn't have a swan skull and I had two. So I sent him my swan skull in exchange for a badger skull, a barn owl skull and he gave me a rabbit leg with the bones glued together which was great as well ! But this week I am just going to write about the badger skull.

Other things I've found in the woods

When I'm in woods looking for bones, I find a lot of other cool stuff as well. Here are some of the things that I've found and kept.

The shot red deer stag

I found this red deer skull about three months ago. I found it in a poachers pit in Suicides Graves wood.

Poachers are people who shoot deer without permission of the person who owns the land to steal the meat. Sometimes they work during the night so no-one can see them or catch them. Sometimes they shoot the deer with a gun, sometimes they use a crossbow, and sometimes they use big dogs to hunt deer.