2011 has been another brilliant year

2011 has been the fifth year I have been bone collecting, and the third year I have had this blog, and I think it has been the best year yet. I have explored new woods, watched deer and foxes, spotted new birds and found some fantastic skulls and bones.

The five skulls I would most like to find in 2012

At the end of every year so far that I have been writing my blog, I have written about the five skulls I hope to collect in the next year. Most of the time I have been really lucky, and I have found them, but there have always been some that I didn't find. It helps me think about what I can collect over the next year, and where I might find them.

Have a happy Christmas !

Happy Christmas everyone ! I'm hoping to get loads of presents and I hope you do too !

My birthday skull

Today is my tenth birthday ! I have a busy day planned and I am going to the cinema and my uncle and aunt have come over to stay as well. I even have a special birthday skull which I am going to write about today.

A few days ago the postman came with a parcel for me. It was from my friend Mrs Powell who is a bone collector in England. I opened it and the first thing I saw was a box full of leaflets about plants which is cool, another box which said "Happy 10th birthday, Jake", which had a birthday card, a present, and another box which had this amazing skull which is from...

My hooked-nosed sea pig skull

This is a post I have been meaning to write for ages. It is about a skull I swapped with my friend Mrs Powell when we met at the Scottish Seabird Centre in October. I meant to write about it the next week, but then all sorts of things happened, and then I wrote posts about being on Autumnwatch so I haven't had chance to write about it until now.

If you were just looking at this skull you might thing it was from some kind of savage animal like a bear  or a big cat (although the teeth are wrong for those). It is about 25cm long, which makes it one of the biggest skulls I have (apart from my cow, my red deer and my fallow deer). It feels chunky, rough and solid, and a bit frightening, so it can be a big surprise that it is actually from....

Why swan sternums are strange bones

Last week me and dad were on a walk up to the geese lakes to hopefully see the greylag geese that come here over the winter. We didn't see any of the greylags, so on the way back we decided to walk along the Rhynd lochs which I wrote about here. We walked along the very edge of the Upper Rhynd looking for bones, when dad saw a strange bone buried in the ground. It was a type of bone I have seen loads of but I have never seen one this big or as interesting.

When I wrote about the Autumnwatch mystery bone last week that was a sternum of a mammal. This was a type of sternum too, but from a bird. It was so big that could only have come from one bird: a swan.