#burying method

[bonespired]

When to unbury a carcass? (If it was buried in the fall?) /The Fox Project/

My first fresh, whole body rot down carcass experience is now collected.

At the beginning of this fall, I received a call from a friend who said he had run into a fresh fox carcass while dog walking in the forest. I wanted an adult fox for a long while now - I have a juvenile one, but not an adult. And from an artistic standpoint foxes are very interesting, because on the outside they look like they have a wolf-like skull, but nothing is farther from the truth, so this fox would be a very prized member of my reference collection.

The only problem was that we were right at the beginning of fall- that means everything that helps the rotting process was just about to halt. I couldn't leave her out in the open, so I had to relocate her, but did I want to take the head and clean it in the fast way or clean in the slow way?

Let's talk a bit about the fast and slow ways!

With the fast way, I could just chop off the head right at the atlas, bag it, take it home, skin it, deflesh it, and either way macerate it - I do have a heater for it - or even boil it. Yes, I know boiling is easy to fuck up and ruin bones, but sometimes I do use boil. I boiled a small rat skull, because burying left me with a fall-apart tiny rat skull (that I glued together, but oh God, I don't want to re-live the experience). But defleshing a skull by hand won't give me a 100% clean end result, because there are places that I simply cannot reach. Macerating is not my favourite method, because of very smelly reasons - but sometimes I have no other choice.

The slow method, however, is simple - just bury the fox, mark the place, try to secure it the best you can and wait.

The first method is fast and secures the skull, sure as hell I won't loose the skull or teeth. The second is cleaner, but I can lose the whole carcass anytime, and the question is when to unbury it without giving myself nightmares is also on.

At the end the species of the carcass made the decision: this is a fox. And even if rabies is rare where I live, we still have it and sure as hell I won't skin a wild animal without knowing the COD for sure - my best bet is she was killed by a human, foxes with rabies tend to hide before dying. She was found very close to a farm with chickens, so I think the farm owner either shot her or poisoned her - she died next to the creek, probably got caught drinking or went to drink bc of rat poison. But I couldn't know for sure. So, gloves on, bagged her and went to bury her.

But for how long?

After burying her, I went out on the internet to collect some data about how long it takes for a medium-sized, fully intact, non-skinned animal to rot down underground, starting with the cold months. Found Jake's blog and he happened to have a very similar project to mine - a whole, intact fox he buried right at the beginning of the fall - if I recall correctly - without skinning. He let his fox rot down for a whole year and at the end, he pulled out a whole, clean skeleton: no fur, no skin.

Well, Jake is living in Scotland. Scotland is slightly colder and definitely wetter than my country, but overall we have very similar weather. If his fox took a whole year to decompose fully, mine probably takes the same amount of time. But if I am paranoid - and I often am, lost some great finds in nature before - I can give my fox a visit in 6 months maybe. I only wanted the head, but Jake wanted the whole skelly for his project.

Fast forward 6 months, things went well, the fox remained undisturbed, and I felt like maybe the skull is in a collectible state, so yesterday evening nagged the husband into checking on the fox.

This will be easy, I thought. We know where she is, I thought. Just digging a bit and pulling out clean bones, I thought.

Yeah, I was an idiot.

The place was there, still undisturbed, everything went fine, moving the logs away, we put on her, to make things harder for fellow foxes to dig her out. And I started to dig. And dig. And dig. And when I didn't find any trace of her, I started to get worried.

What I did find was tons of bugs - the forest soil is extremely rich and living. Perfect choice to let a girl with a bug phobia dig - I literally scream-jumped every five minutes, whenever something slimy moved as I uncovered it. But this is my hobby, and the hobby has dark moments as well.

But after that hour, I really started to turn blue. I really wanted this fox, and I knew bones can change places when you bury them, but they are literally disappearing??? I totally thought I lost a whole freaking fox in the forest. Plus, I also wanted to go an hour before sunset, because this will be an easy job, and won't take long. So we were out there, in the forest, digging and occasionally screaming in the cold and dark like idiots, while I developed a small emotional breakdown over losing a skull. This was the point when the husband decided we won't go home without finding the bones, and he found her literally within 5 minutes. I should let him dig right from the start.

How I imagined finding her was we find some fur, because creatine is the last to go (not counting the bones) and with luck that's it, no horror, just bones. What we got however was the fur, the bones and the freaking skin still clinging to life. Skin is always the thoughtest part of the body, it just refuses to step into oblivion. But considering we buried this lady, all intact at the beginning of the cold months, spent 6 months underground, with a relatively mild winter, it was enough for all the soft tissues, organs, flesh, everything to be fairly gone. Except the skin.

All in all, we found the skull, collected the skull, sadly lost 3 small teeth - had no chance to find them - and a canine, but I found the canine. Brought home, washed, hopefully did not lose any more teeth - double checked, so I have to have them all - and now she is degreasing. Which will be several weeks probably - I could see on the teeth they still have stuff inside them, but somehow hoped the skull was finished with the marrow. As it looks like, that's not the case, tons of grease are releasing from the skull and degreasing always takes ages without heavy chemicals.

Conclusion

If you buried something medium-sized, fresh, and intact at the beginning of the cold months, and are wondering when you can unbury it:

Depends on the weather, but if you have a winter where the average temperature is below the freezing point, but not above 10 Celsius, the rotting will still take place relatively speedy - enough for all the organs and flesh to go. This means 6 months. So all fall and winter. You can give a try to unbury the carcass, if you are ready to deal with the degrease that's coming and the sight of the still rotting skin. Teeth will be loose, watch out for them!

Degreasing. 6 cold months apparently is not enough to get rid of the marrow totally. This means you still have to do a full degreasing round. Depending on what you use, this can mean months. If you don't want to deal with that much grease, I'd leave the carcass underground for a whole year. (But if I recall, Jake also spent long weeks with degreasing after a year of rotting down his fox.)

If you have colder weather than this - freezing, snowing, minus degrees - I would definitely wait until next fall to unbury, just to be sure, so a whole year spent underground.

Mark the spot! And not just the area where you buried - the spot where you put the carcass! Take photos of the carcass in what position you put it on the ground, where the head is, etc! It caused some real pain to find her, where she is exactly, and then which end is which. Bones move over time, but not under this short amount of time - probably everything will be where you left it.

DO NOT go out to unbury the carcass right before sunset. You don't know how much you have to look for the carcass. If you are worried about being spotted, pick a period of the day when people is not around - dawn or morning.

Gloves (spare pairs too!), bag, and hand sanitizer are a MUST! Rabies is not a problem with tissue gone, but you can still get an infection from the juices.

That's it for now, the project goes on. I will probably degrease the bones for weeks now. As for disinfection, sadly I don't have liquid peroxide, only cream. Still looking for the liquid one, but ever since I cannot make sure the cream will cover every inch of the skull, I prepare to boil the skull a tiny bit. I am extremely cautious with boiling though - I am not cooking, just disinfecting. Plan to give her a 10-minute long simmer bath (max) depending on the bones. I boiled my juvenile longer - as my first skull, I had no idea how long I should do it - and the skull is still perfectly fine, not damaged, so 10 mins won't kill my adult fox either.

Will come back with updates though!

[bonespired]

Cleaning Bones: The Cheap Burying Method

When I decided to jump into this skull-collecting hobby, I kind of made a roadmap for myself. Good thing it is simple! I just needed to:

Find bones.

Clean them.

The first step is done I found my bones in the ways I talked about in the longer post I made about how and where to find bones when you are living in the city, so that part is done - now I am happily owning several stinky, rotting and disease-infected bones. Now I just have to clean them!

(Just to be sure: in this post under the words "cleaning bones" I strictly mean get rid of the meat/other soft tissue, not degreasing and disinfecting! Degreasing already has its own beginner-friendly post - which was reblogged so many times, I couldn't believe it!

This is easier to say than do because there are several options for cleaning bones from bugs to chemicals:

The complete list looks like this - you can clean bones by:

letting them rot on the surface

macerate it, which means let them rot in a bucket of water

boil them

toss them to the bugs - beetle colony

bury them

Not every method is suitable for every individual or even for every bone. Someone living in a busy neighbourhood on the 6th floor probably won't let the head rot naturally or start a beetle colony. So let's start simple and talk about the

Rot Pot aka. The Burying Method

The burying method basically means you bury your bones under ground and leave them to do their things naturally. There are some pros and cons to this method:

Pros:

it is doable in a flat (will tell you how!)

it has zero smell - nothing!

it is cheap!

doesn't require your time or effort at all (during rotting)

Did you just say I can rot carcasses in my flat without ANY smell and constant health department visits????

I did! You can totally rot away things even if you don't live in the middle of the forest - all you need is a plant pot that is big enough for your carcass, soil, some pebbles if you like (explaining in a sec), a plant if you like it, maggots if you feel like and you are good to go!

So the very basic equation for this is the carcass + pot + soil = bones. Your starter pack can be only the pot and soil. You grab the pot, fill it with one layer of soil - I like to make it quite thick to make a carcass sandwich here: I want my skull to be in the middle, so I am aiming for circa the same amount of soil on the bottom and on the top as well. Put your carcass into the pot and cover it with more soil. Keep it moist, so water it, like you'd water a plant and you are done.

For dirt, you can have plant dirt, bought in a store or you can bring some dirt in from nature. Pro, nature dirt has all the nice living bacteria colonies in it, hungry for some meat. Con, it can look weird if you start to shovel up the dirt of your local park. If you can get natural dirt, go for it!

If you wanna go fancy, you can put some pebbles into the pot as the first layer, so pebbles -> soil -> carcass -> soil. The pebbles' job is to ensure drainage. Drainage, you may ask? What kind of drainage? Well, water ofc and eh... body juices. Do not worry, nothing nasty will come out of your rot pot! But you have to let the rot pot drain, it won't be like a flood, trust me, I buried several things and no horror scene happened, ever. It is more for the water than the juice, just like for any plant case.

As for the maggots, you can go to a fish store - like a fishermen's store? To the store where you can buy rods and such things? Where do people go to get their baits for fishing? Idk what it is named in English, so go to the fish bait store and ask for maggots. We call them "bony"s over here, they eat rotting things. You can sprinkle these guys as sugar confetti over your bones and bury them with it! They will be fine, happily munching away on the flesh - maybe some of them will be outraged, disagreeing with being buried alive and they climb around on the surface, but once they realise the good thing is under them, they will deep dive into the ground. In this case, however, keep your pot outside. These guys become flies over 2-3 days and then they will be ready to discover the world, so they will be swarming and you definitely do not want to keep them in your living quarters.

You can also get free maggots by leaving the carcass out in the open for a day or two as a peace offering to the Fly Gods, but your carcass will definitely smell during the offering.

You can plant a plant(??? English ffs) over it, making it fancy. That is just for the fanciness.

And that's it, job done! You can totally forget about the pot, except for the watering and you can chill around.

But, like every method, this also has cons:

the waiting time: it won't be done tomorrow

not knowing when it is done

stains. on the bones. from dirt.

small bones are falling apart

oh and you have to skin your carcass!

Skinning?????

Ah, yessss..... You know, skin is problematic. But the real asshole here is creatine. Creatine is the stuff that builds up nails, whiskers and fur and they refuse to rot away easily. It takes a significantly long amount of time to dig out a corpse fully cleaned, with no flesh and fur. Ain't have years to wait for that, so to avoid rotting skin with still attached creatin to it - also skin loves to stick to the bones like a glove, especially on the head, I swear to God.... - you have to get rid of it beforehand. This means you have to skin your carcass. Your possibly smelly carcass. Not everyone has the stomach for it or the heart. I skinned a fresh rat I had found outside - and I am obsessed with rats. I seriously adore them, I have pet rats, I rescued rats, I supported our local wild rat colony with rat-friendly food during winter, and I love the buggers. I basically worship them. I did some anatomy studies of them for my art and I love biology, but there is a difference between actually skinning the animal you love and drawing the muscles. So I really wanted a rat skull, because I draw lots of rats, need a reference. And I have a rat carcass. But I love rats. But if I let it rot I am risking losing the rat and the skin will be a problem. So I made the decision of skinning. But not only skinning, oh no. You see, I only needed the head. Everything else is just too small for me to put together. So I not only needed to skin the animal I love I also needed to cut the head off of it. And I did exactly that. I wanted the skull more than I wanted to adore and feel sorry for the poor rat. How was it going? I constantly asked her forgiveness - she was dead for hours, I didn't kill her, a cat did - and once I was done and buried and cleaned up, I cried for 20 minutes, thinking about how horrible a rat parent am I because I just skinned a rat and buried its head. It was with me for days. The psychological effect is definitely something you have to think about. Maybe you will find a cat and you are into vulture culture, but also a cat person: then what? Skinning animals, especially the ones we keep as pets can be challenging.

The waiting is over... or is it not?

The other cons factor is the waiting time. It differs from carcass to carcass, how meaty it was, whether was it skinned before, and how big the carcass is.... my rat skull (skinned) was done in under 2 weeks, but a bigger animal, like a skinned sheep, can take a month - month and a half. The bigger the skull is, the more soft tissues it has due to its size, the longer it will be under the ground. But how can you be sure about the end of the process? That's it, you cannot! You have to check it out manually, you have to dig it out to see yourself. And digging out early, well, that is not a pleasant experience.

Stains?

Dirt causes some brown discolouring in the bones. Personally, I like it, I think it is a cool colour! But if you want museum-quality, well, burying is probably not the best method. You can still use H2O2 ofc, but there is the chance some stains stay.

The 3D puzzle problem

And lastly, the problem I hate the most: if you bury a small skull, it will fall apart. Period. Every time. I saw people pulling out fully attached big skulls, but I buried small skulls - you cannot macerate rodents, so I guessed my rat goes into the pot to avoid this problem! And now I have this nice 3D puzzle to put together - yes, I am crying inside.

My rabbit doesn't look better either.

You wouldn't even think how fragile, thin and small pieces are part of a skull. And now I have the luck to know. Yaaaaay.

If you wanna get into bone restoration, this is a great starter package for you, but if not, then once again: burying is not for you.

Overall, burying is indeed a flat-friendly method, and takes little effort - well, not counting the skinning - smell-free, which is a big pro. I did not lose a tooth with burying, everything rots away wonderfully - even too well. But there is the skinning, there is the small skull problem, and staining can be a problem for many... personally, I will ditch this method because I did not want to get into restoring small skulls, but now I have to. For small skulls, I rather secure them somewhere and let nature take its course. (I never want to skin a rat ever again, so I will do my best to restore that skull.)