It's New Years Eve and I've now been bone collecting for six years - crickey ! - and writing this blog for 3 and a half years. It has been fun but tough at times, and I'm looking forward to the twelve months.
There is some really interesting and amazing stuff I have been working on but I can't tell you about you just yet, but here are the best bits from 2012....
• The Best Bits of 2012
This year has been fun, but I haven't gone out on as many walks as I wanted. That's partly because I have only one possible day to go on walks on the weekend, the summer was awful for weather, and a lot of the woods have been blown down by the storms.
Because of that I've explored lots of news places and found the old sawmill, the amazing deserted castle, the mysterious cross, and I've done lots of research on the old country house near my village which disappeared.
I've stalked red deer during the rut, found that red deer have moved to the Gleneagles wood, watched roe bucks fighting there, saw a stoat attack a rabbit and seen a rook attack a red kite !
Two of the most fun things this year were on the sea looking at birds. In the River Forth estuary I went on an amazing seabird cruise, and on the Isle of Skye I saw white-tailed sea eagles which was absolutely amazing.
I never expected I would find an old unexploded bomb, but I did and it led to amazing things.
I finally got round to cleaning up Pharoah's bones and found some amazing pathology there, invented a special cleaner for cleaning smaller bones which works amazingly, and updated a whole new section on how I clean bones.
I now have my first official bone licences for my pipistrelle bat skeleton and my otter skeleton, and I took advice from readers here about making my bone collection more professional.
It was great to be featured (twice) in the Times as a child blogger and to be in the newspapers after I found the bomb.
• People I want to say thank you to
People have been really really really kind this year, and I want thank you to everyone but I missed someone I am sorry !
I want to thank....
The anonymous retired stalker who sent me a biscuit tin full of skulls including the absolutely amazing golden eagle skull.
Scottish Natural Heritage and DEFRA for working out that I was allowed to keep the golden eagle skull.
Ric Morris for the kind books and the amazing bones he dropped off (some of which I am still preparing)
Mr Evans who found out about me because of the Times article, and who gave me the brilliant otter skeleton, the other bones and a surprise Christmas gift.
Jen Randolph Quinney for the amazing archeological bones.
Mrs Powell who is a brilliant bone collector who does so well on Paolo's Mystery Object every Friday.
Ben Garrod for the Chinese Water deer skull and all the help on the fox I am working on rearticulating at the moment.
Catherine Smith and Paolo Viscardi again for all the advice and encouragement and Paolo's amazing website
Psydrache (Sonja) for the brilliant marten skull I haven't written about yet.
Sonja, Emma Carpenter, Michael James Fox and Jack for sharing their stories about their favourite bones.
Grandma and Grandad for the skulls book.
Emmy for keeping in touch.
Dad for taking all the photos and Mum for putting up with my bones.
and everyone who has sent me an email or left a comment and who have made me laugh or happy that I have helped others and who all make the time I put in worthwhile
• Visitors to this blog
Last year I had 33,641 visitors, and this year I have more than twice as many with
Last year I got 185 comments and 393 emails. This year I have had 490 comments (not including the ones on my Facebook page or Twitter) and 557 emails and I have tried to reply to every single one. This time last year I had 200 Facebook fans of my website; today I have 428 !
I have written 219 posts so far, and I haven't run out of ideas yet. I have lots of stuff I want to write about in 2013 and hopefully soon I will have something really amazing to share with you.
Happy New Year everyone !
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jacoby