The RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch (with a video !)

This weekend was the Big Garden Birdwatch which is an event by the RSPB where thousands of people watch their garden for an hour and count what species of birds they see. I'm a member of the RSPB and I done this for years now although often my results weren't very interesting.

Anyone in the UK can take part: here's the link !

I did mine this afternoon. You have to count the most birds of each type you see in one go. Here is what I saw (with a time-lapse video at the end !) Above are some of the birds I usually see on my birdtable. How many do you think I saw today ?

How to rearticulate a fox skeleton: part two

Two weeks ago I posted about my finished rearticulated fox skeleton Vulpy, and last weekend I wrote about the first half of how I did it. In the first half of my guide I wrote about doing the spine, the back legs and front legs which may seem like a lot but it's still only half way there !

The final steps are the feet, the tail, the ribs and attaching the skull.

How to re-articulate a fox skeleton: part one

This is going to a big post about how I put my fox skeleton Vulpy back together. I started on 22nd December and took photographs at every stage, and I finished it on the 6th January after a LOT of hard work. I took photographs at every stage and while I had some help there were some bits I didn't get right first time.

Last week I wrote about it when it was finished, but here is the first of two big big posts about I did it. There may be better ways or different ways to do it, but this is how I did it....

My finished rearticulated fox skeleton !

My big project for the Christmas holidays was rearticulating (putting back together) my fox skeleton Vulpy. I finally got round to finishing it two nights ago and it took AGES but now it looks amazing.

When I first got Vulpy she was a present from a local gamekeeper who had shot her when she was killing lambs. So she started as a fresh body, then I buried her, left her for months, then dug her up when she was all clean. She's has been in one of my storage boxes since then but I thought she would be good to practice rearticulation on because I have almost every single bone from her.

Next week I'm write about every stage of how I did it (here it is now !), but this week I am going to show you how she looks now she is finished.

Seven things that bone collectors can do over winter

I was reading Julia's bone collecting blog about a month ago when she wrote about how winter makes it difficult for bone collectors to find bones. Where I live the winters can quite be bad. When it does snow the snow covers up the bones, its difficult to drive up to the hills, and stalking animals at close range is harder because of the crunch of the snow. Dad and I were exploring a new wood earlier in the week and even in the middle of the day it almost pitch black in the wood. Small patches of snow had fallen through here and there making it look like bones, and we both fell in a stream we couldn't see because of a snowdrift.

That started me thinking about what things bone collectors can do over the winter months. Here are my seven ideas.....