15 things I've learned in 2013

It is a real pleasure writing this blog and replying to the hundreds of people who email me. I reckon I must have spent about six or seven hours every week either exploring, walking, finding and preparing bones, and writing posts, which is pretty amazing if you think about it.

At the end of every year that I have written on this blog I do a review of the year, so this one is my fifth one. This year has been tough at times but also fun.  Here are the fifteen things I have learned this year:

Happy Christmas everyone !

Happy Christmas everyone ! I don't think we'll get snow like this here in Scotland (this was from earlier in the year) but I hope you all have a lovely Christmas with friends and family and get everything you ask for.

I'll do my final blog post of the year in a week's time, when I'll do a roundup of what 2013 has meant to me.

Cleaning the badger's skeleton

Last week I wrote about the road kill badger (I've named it Emily) that I had to collect right after the storm. I prefer to leave bodies for a long time until there is no soft tissue left, but I had to collect this one before it had fully decomposed because the spot I'd picked for it had been disturbed.

I cleaned the bones over four days. I've written about cleaning bones before (and wrote a big guide to it here) but I used slightly different methods for this one. This is how I did it !

Rescuing the badger body after the storm

I ended last week's post by worrying about the big storm we had in the UK (100mph near us !) and whether it had damaged the wood where my trail camera was. That wood is on top of a great moor, and you can see for about 20 miles in three of the four directions, so it was quite exposed. It turned out that wood was hardly damaged at all, but another wood was damaged that was important to me !

I call that wood "The Mortuary Wood", and it is where I left the badger and the buzzard bodies to decompose.  It is for away enough away from houses so people cannot smell the decomposition smell  but is close enough to the road so it's easy to bring the bodies in and keep checking on them. I went up on Saturday morning to check on the bodies and I was shocked by what I found !

A month of filming a pine marten

Pine martens are kind of amazing. They are rare, hard to spot, cute, and tough. It never even occurred to be that there might be some nearby, and I only found out about it by using my trail camera (which I wrote about before here).

This is quite a long post, but I thought it was best to talk through all the stages I went through, and all the failures and all the successes. I know there are a lot of naturalists in the UK who would really like to film a pine marten too, so I hope this helps. There are a lot of videos but they are mostly very short. If you love nature, you HAVE to read this post !