My first attempt at making footprint casts

For a while now I have wanted to make plaster casts of wild animal footprints. You can make them from plaster of paris, using the impression of the animal's footprint as a mould, then you have a permanent model which you can take away showing the bottom of the animal's foot. 

I did these ones about a month ago, before the weather started to get cold. When it gets colder, it takes longer for the cast to set, so if you are in the UK this might be something to leave until next spring. Here's how I did it (and my way wasn't perfect !)

Cleaning a mummified fox skull.

This is really a story about two things - about cleaning a skull and about the amazing lady who gave it to me. At the end of August I came home from a day at my new school to find a lady, called Miss Ford, who I didn't know, was at my house. It was a big surprise !

She said that she read about me in the Telegraph Magazine in February, and she wanted to give some skulls to me. She only knew the village where I lived, so she had driven up from England and asked at my old primary school in my village, who phoned my home, and luckily my dad was in and invited her over.

Why I just LOVE the new Beauly to Denny power line

This is a picture of the hills to the north of my village, The woods you can see are the woods I have collected most of my red deer bones from. Herds of red deer live there, as well as foxes, red squirrels, buzzards, red kites, roe deer, newts and a lot more.

But can you tell what the landscape REALLY needs, and what would make it look better ? If you can't work it out, then it's because you don't love the countryside as much as Scottish and Southern Electricity. Read on to find out how they are making this view more beautiful.

Learning how to use my Bushnell trail camera

I spent a lot of time in woods looking for deer and other animals. After I broke my leg earlier this year dad came up with the idea that we could go up to the woods for a hour and just sit and wait to see what animals would come. That got me wondering: what waited for a week what would we see ? Obviously you can't wait in a wood for a week, but you can set up a trail camera (Americans call it a trophy camera, no idea why).

So since then I have wanted a trail cam, and decided it would be the first thing I bought with my book money. It is a small camera that you set up in the countyside and it takes a pic, or shoots videos when it detects movement. I asked on Twitter and people generally said Bushnell trail cams are the best, especially the ones with "invisible" lighting at night. So me and dad looked at prices, but the newer models were quite expensive, and I wasn't sure how often I would use it. So we got a older, used Bushnell 119436C cam, with my first book money. This is how it looks !