Sunday, 7 April 2013

The next step.


The next step.

Ok, so I already told you how I first became interested in skull collecting, but this is how I started to build my collection.

The first two skulls on my shelf had come to me through dumb luck, so I was unsure how to expand into my newfound hobby. Like all tech savvy teenagers, I turned to google, and through the advice of several people in the know, I set out on my bike with an empty rucksack, plastic bags and a trowel.

On my first couple of trips, I blasted down every country lane at high speeds, stopping every half a kilometre to poke about in bushes… needless to say, I found nothing. Frustrated by this, and yet sure that there must be more bony goodies out there, I began to slowly cruise on my bike, peering into the hedgerow and stopping regularly, normally just to find bleached sticks. But, not ten minutes from home, I stumbled across a chunk of bone collector goldmine, road kill…

Now, I don’t mean the sticky smelly kind you see crushed into the tarmac, but a neat pile of sun bleached white bones in a grass verge away from the edge of the road. In anticipation for my first find “au natural “ I had been skimming  animal tracking and sighting handbooks before bed which had left me with a beginners eye in skull identification.


This enabled me to correctly guess the species I had found ( the first time I had guessed correctly based only on what I could see), so what had I found, the rarest of finds maybe? No, I had come across possibly the most hated road wildlife after pheasants, a muntjac deer. A female (doe or hind to be precise). Still, I don’t think I had ever been as excited as I was right then, carefully packing it away in my rucksack and rushing home on my bike.

Now, a quick word on muntjac, I'm told that in some parts of Britain, they are never seen, such as Scotland, but here in Suffolk, they are actually  more common than clouds, and as such, being an invasive species, they are regarded as little more than large rats. You cannot leave your house for more than twenty seconds without nearly running over one in your car…

now, until the next time... thanks for reading.

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