Five cool mysteries from yesterday's walk

I'm in the last few weeks of my school holiday (Scottish schools go back earlier than English schools), and yesterday I had planned to explore a new wood high on the moors which needed to start with a steep climb up the hill. But as I set off I could see the rain coming in over the hills, and I knew it was going to be a long, exposed walk to the wood, so instead I decided to go back to Suicides Graves, which is a large red deer wood I've explored many times before.

So dad and I went looking for deer and bones and we took a loop through the wood, starting with the south east edge, moving along the south, then cutting back through the middle of the wood to look for frogs. ( I found loads !) On the walk we found five pretty cool mysteries: can you solve them ? (Click on "Click to see the answer" under each one to reveal what it was !)

Q. How did a hedgehog get run over in the middle of a wood ?

At the very start of the walk, we found a dead hedgehog at the base of a tree. But the strange thing was that it was completely flat from being run over The only way that a hedgehog could be squashed like this is if it was ran over by a car or lorry, but there are no cars in this wood, the nearest road is 300 yards away, and it was much too rough for quad-bikes or motorbikes. So what happened ?

• Click to see the answer !

A. It got run over but then was moved.

It wasn't until I looked up that I realised the hedgehog body was directly underneath a buzzard nest (the thick black part - buzzard nests are very big !)

The buzzard must have picked it up from the road where it had been killed, then brought it to the nest, probably for the chicks to feed on. It didn't seem to have been well pecked, so it probably wasn't a great food source for them.

Q2.  What animal is this the body of ?

The woods are surrounded by farmland. I caught a glimpse of this through the long grass in a field to the west where cows and sheep are normally kept. Can you tell what animal it is ?

• Click to see the answer !

A. It's not a body at all !

As I got closer to it, It started to look different.  I realised that it was a weird  white patch on a rock, which from a distance happened to look like a skull. Of course, when you were next to it it looked nothing like it !

Q3. What animal is this bone from ?

At the furthest point on the walk was a small area of pine trees on the south-west corner , which I searched. It was most likely to be from a young red deer - there were lots of red deer bones which I spotted on the walk - but the proportions of the bone looked wrong, especially where the knee end widens out. The only thing I could be sure about was that it was young when it died because the end of the bones were unfused, and that it was a left femur (thigh bone).

• Click to see the answer !

A. Unbelievably: a cow.

I had a weird hunch about this at the time, but this is it back at home, laid out next to sheep and red deer bones. It is too wide at the bottom end to be either of those.

A juvenile cow bone is the last thing you'd expect to find in a pine forest, but almost two years before I found a metacarpal (lower front leg bone) from a juvenile cow much further into the same forest. I'm reasonably sure that what I found is from the same animal, and possibly even from the same leg, and that the leg was dragged into the wood by foxes.  I don't have many cow bones and now I have one more !

4. How did this tunnel form ?

When we came out onto the south edge of the wood, there was a low fence which separated it from farmland. At the base of the fence I found a old plastic box in a pile of stones. I rolled it over with my foot and found that there was a big tunnel vertically underneath it for at least two metres. 

I asked this on Twitter the same evening, and no-one worked it out. Can you ?

• Click to see the answer !

A. It was caused by acid.

The box was a wet-cell battery which was upside down, leaked acid, and over time the acid eroded the soil structure underneath. The battery was smaller than a car battery, so was probably from a quad bike,, and a farmer just tossed it over the fence when it stopped working.

5. What woodpecker makes this noise ?

At the south part of the wood, we sat in the edge of the trees, watching for any red deer in the field where they often graze. We didn't see any, but we kept on hearing a knocking noise. At first I did not know what it was. Then I thought it could be a woodpecker, but we looked around and could not see a woodpecker, but then you often can't. It was three or four very loud taps, with a pause of about a minute between them. What caused it ?

• Click to see the answer !

A. A farmer !

After we started looking for the woodpecker, we saw a farmer repairing the fence that runs around the border of the wood. (We found a dead deer stuck in one of the fence posts). It must have been hard work, because when we left the wood, a couple of  hours later, he had moved much further along !

So how many did you guess ? Be honest !

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