My Little Friends

Here are some of the skulls I've collected in the field over the years.

The one on the right is a duck, and I think the one on the left is an owl. Unfortunately, since I'm a botanist, I never took any advanced anatomy/physiology courses in college.


I think the really clean one is a poodle or something. I found it near a residential area in Hood River. The other two are a muskrat and a lab rat. Behind the skulls is a large tortiose's carapace.


From left: muskrat, raccoon or possum, nutria, cat, another raccoon or possum. Behind/between the two rightmost skulls is a rat skull that I mounted in an antique wooden pastels box that I lined with handmade African paper.

This horse's skull was my greatest score. First, it was already nearly completely clean. Second, I almost never find both the skull and the jaw of anything. Third, it was found only about 10 feet from where I parked, so I didn't hafta lug it around with me all day.


These are windchimes that I made from the femur and humerus bones of roadkill (small furbears), with the scapula of a mule deer as the wind catcher. I shellacked the bones first to waterproof them and give them that rich amber color. The tubes are from a length of copper pipe that I cut and drilled myself. Small vertebrae cap the leg bones. I don't know shit about the tonality of copper tubing, and accidentally cut the pipe into lengths that emit a delightfully sinister series of sharp and flat notes when the wind blows. Just lucky, I guess.

I'll post pictures of my insect, fish and herpetofauna collections tomorrow when I can get photos in the daylight.

Oh, and sorry these pics are so tiny. I took them with my phone and don't know how to enlarge them without making gigantic pixels of distortion.