Among fish, bird, fur beetles and larder beetles

Some years ago I got a couple of boxes with eagle candy, e.g. the leftovers collected underneath eagles nest. These were collected in the 70’s and given to me a few years back. They’ve never really looked through been neither by the colletor or me  and has been stored in my food cellar until now. As you can see on the pictures there are lots of parts of plastic bags which show that they have dived in one way or another but mice or other rodents have been feasting in the boxes and destroyed the plastic bags.

I and my fiancée, who sheers my interest in bones; her particular interest is fish bones, started to sort them today. As there was a bundle of them it took the better part of the day just to sort the fish from birds, we also found some bones from rodents and other small animals.

This is therapy work with an osteological edge; it is fun and interesting but a bit bizarre. Fur beetles (Attagenus pellio), larder beetles (Dermestes lardarius) and rat/mice turds made the process a bit groce. But all in all we found a lot of interesting bones that will be part of our reference collection, will have lots of doubles so there might be some if anyone interested though we have some who already queues.

Most of the bones are from birds; wading birds, ducks and hens of different sorts and of course fishes such as pike, herring, perch etc.

Pike head (large)

Pike head (large)

In the future we will take the bones to the osteological laboratory and art determine them.

In a way this was good preparation for the Osteological association’s seminar tomorrow (today) which is called “Bird and fish bones – methods and seasonality” (more info here).

Magnus Reuterdahl

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