Found Bones - Part 1

I live way out in the country on the "Nature Coast" of Florida, in Dixie County. The Suwannee River is less than a quarter of a mile away and the Gulf of Mexico is about a 40 minute drive. There are so many different kinds of wild creatures to be seen in my yard alone. Deer, boar, turkey, rabbits, opossum, armadillo, snakes, frogs, mice, raccoons, owls, woodpeckers, lizards, skinks and on and on.


Juvenile Grey Rat Snake.


Wild Turkey chick saved from my cat and returned to mother.


Playing tag with a young Nine-banded Armadillo.

Much of the bones in my collection have been found over the years. But once I acquired part feral dogs, they seemed to just appear in my yard. I consider them gifts from my dogs. :)

I find bones fairly regularly in my yard because my dogs, Falcor and Artax, find the remains that hunters throw in the woods... or roadkill.

While I moved out here to be one with nature, much of the original residents here enjoy killing the animals I love to catch a glimpse of. I really don't like hunting but I have also come to realize that a lot of the people that live out in rural areas like this feed their families this way. I imagine there are even more people hunting now with the economy so bad.

From time to time the dogs drag a skull of a wild boar into the yard or I just find remains of the teeth or part of a jaw. This is the largest remains of a boar skull I've found yet. Looks like it has been in the woods for a long time. Wish I knew where my dogs were finding these!



Below is a found Wild Boar jaw that I wedged in between tree limbs. If you look carefully you can see where animals have been gnawing on it for calcium. I have deer antlers outside that they have nearly completely chewed up. This jaw has been here for so long now that the tree is actually growing into it. Amazing.



I'm hoping that my dogs didn't kill the dog this skull is from. They had been chewing on it in the yard and broke it. I plan on attempting to glue it back together.



One day I found this huge spine and ribcage in my back yard. It is either from a wild boar or deer.



But Falcor wasn't letting me near it for long.



By the next day all that remained was part of the spine. So I tossed it somewhere the dogs couldn't get to and it is cleaning up real nice all by itself.



Stay tuned for more in this series of found bones to come.