Francis Hickenbottom’s Nature Notes.
2nd October 2011
A return to work after the summer holiday always causes the entries in my personal natural history diary to reduce drastically. There is less time available for making observations and less for recording them.
Having said this, the very warm weather that arrived this week has led to one or two observations. One effect of the heat is that I seem to be spending a lot of time trying to get to sleep during the early hours of the morning. As a result of this, I have heard the calls of tawny owls several times. This isn’t very unusual in many areas but there aren’t a lot of trees in Hemworth and it isn’t normal to hear owls in the evenings. There are wooded areas a short distance away from the centre and I wonder whether the owls move in from there during the night.
I have walked the two or three miles from Ackworth to Hemsworth several times during the hot spell and I have noticed how frequently there have been rustlings in the grass by the roads and paths as small mammals scuttled away. I don’t know whether I have noticed them more often than usual simply because I had been wondering how the tawny owls find sufficient food or because conditions have been good for small mammals this year and they are more numerous than usual.
One mammal that has left more traces than usual this year, according to my observations,
is the hedgehog. I have seen many more droppings than usual this year but I can think
of explanations for this other than an increase in hedgehog numbers. Because of the
dryness of the summer, it seems to me that hedgehogs may have been forced to wander
from areas of thick cover, in which there will usually be lots of food, to feed in
more open areas, such as the school cricket field. An alternative explanation is
that the dry weather has led to a decrease in the frequency of grass-
I ought to point out that the skulls and other bones shown on this site come from animals which have been victims of road traffic or have been found dead due to natural circumstances.
In the early days, I experimented a little with different methods for removing the flesh from my finds. I haven’t got the stomach, or the time, to remove the flesh by hand , so I tried boiling. This took a very long time and didn’t produce results quickly.
The second method that I tried was to drop the bones into water and leave them for months. I found this method very slow and the bones still had flesh on them after many months. I tried burying things but found that this could be a surprisingly slow method, especially with large animals. Finally, I found that the quickest method was to leave bones or carcases on the surface of the soil, with some protection from scavenging animals. For bones with a little flesh remaining, I put them in a spot where there are plenty of slugs as these seem to do a good job of scraping the bones clean.
I usually like to leave the colour of the bones as it is but I have experimented with bleaching agents. After all of my experiments, I have found that the simplest way to bleach them is to leave them out in the sunshine for a few weeks or months.