My daughter and I went on an expedition out to the west side of the county a few weeks back. She loves exploring and I knew of a spot where I'd found a bison skeleton washing out of the side of a creek. I'd always idly wondered if it was still coming out or if it had been completely washed away, SO we decided to go take a look.
We parked on the side of the road and immediately found some pretty cool bones to look at:
As we started digging around the site, it was pretty apparent this was a medium sized canine. I initially thought it might be a coyote, but, sadly, it turned out to be a dog and at least one puppy. Even more tragic was what appeared to be an old plastic garbage bag deteriorating around the bones. Along with the fact that none of the bones appeared to have been broken (meaning not hit by a car), this implied, in my opinion, the dogs had been stuffed in a garbage bag and dumped on the side of the road. It was an interesting adventure for the daughter unit tho!
After digging on the dog bones for a while, we continued on down to the creek where I'd found the bison bones fifteen years or so ago.
Of course, there was plenty of flora to go through first in order to GET to the creek bed.
It was a lot of fun!
...and we even found some fish swimming around (can you see them?).
We found the Bison bones right away. Unfortunately, I had convinced myself that, while I did want to find it, I didn't expect to find it. Thus, I came ill-prepared and had almost nothing with which to dig. SO, we took some good pictures instead. I'll need to get with the property owner if I ever decide I want to go get it.
But wait! It wasn't a waste of a day, not by a long shot. Aside from spending some great quality time with my daughter, we also started finding plenty of bone fragments along the sandy beach (and in the water!).
Our first bone fragment discovery.
Daughter picking up some bone fragments.
Then we started finding some BIG pieces. This is a fragmented bison femur. I'm still not entirely convinced it wasn't harvested because of the type of fracture - it LOOKS like the marrow might have been accessed. It doesn't, however, appear to have been cooked...so who knows? It was pretty exciting though!
So exciting, in fact, that we needed to take a banana break.
After a quick break, we made our BIG find for the day - I don't know that it's necessarily associated with the femur fragment from earlier, but we found the partial, horned skull of a HUGE bison bull.
Daughter checking it out after I pulled it from the creek.
THEN we discovered this Bison skull was actually someone's home! We let him know we were claiming imminent domain on his house and he had to leave.
What a GREAT expedition! We found plenty of exciting bones around the area, took some pictures of some of the flora in the area, and had a pretty good time throwing rocks into the water too!
Of course, we had to show momma what we found too -
More adventures to come!
The birds are singing and the trees are greening.... and the garter snakes are coming up out of the ground....We can usually tell when it's Spring at our place because the cats start bringing in Garter snakes (unharmed) to show us... The snakes are just emerging from hibernation and are easy to catch.. but not a lot of fun to play with (if you are a cat) because they don't move or try to get away. We have a den of them that hibernate underground during the winter in the remains of an old tree stump in our backyard. The cats find them when the snakes come up to catch some sun and get warmed up. Garter snakes (Thamnophis sirtalis)are common in Kansas and harmless, feeding mostly on small insects and worms.
