Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Feathers and Bones (Not for the Faint of Heart)

                               Walking along the bank of a lake, I came across a pretty blue feather.





                                                                ...and then a few others...






                                                                  ...and still some more...





                                                    A few feet away, I found a whole wing!





                                                     I flipped it over to see the other side:








     *          *          *    and now for the bones     *          *          *






I stumbled upon a 'treasure' the other day while walking in a field.  These deer bones were scattered about and picked totally clean by some other animal.  After snapping a picture, I gathered up as many as I could hold.  Having walked the same path just a couple days prior to finding this and not seeing any hint of it, I was amazed at how clean these bones were in such a short time.




These bones belong to a tiny rodent.  I extracted them from an owl pellet--a neat little package of undigestable parts of an animal that an owl has eaten.  It was regurgitated and expelled onto the ground below the branch it perched.  Another treasure!!  I took the time to examine the contents, but unlike the animal mentioned above, I was not thorough in cleaning them and I lacked the patience to find each and every sliver of bone; they were discarded just after I took this picture:



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