Discarded by nature

The park where my office is located is home to a number of deer, including a very large buck.  The glimpses we've caught of him indicated he's either a 10 or 12 pt, with a wide rack and a thick neck.  In laymans terms, a huge deer.

Yesterday one of my co-workers rushed up to me as I arrived at work.  He found half of the big buck's shed antlers, just laying on the side of the road.  Searching for sheds is a big deal among some outdoorsmen.  Some guys train their dogs to find sheds, some track and follow bucks for months to determine where their sheds might lay at the end of winter.  This massive shed was just laying on the side of the road.  It couldn't get much easier to find.

For size visualization purposes, the tallest tine on that half rack is probably a foot and a half long.  Its pretty huge.  The whole thing probably weighs 4 lbs.

Seeing this and hearing where the shed was found, I of course decided that a good portion of my day was going to be spent looking for the other half.  I thought I had a pretty good idea of the buck's range within the park and where he generally preferred to hang out, so off I went.

After around 3 hours of wandering through the woods, I returned basically empty handed.  I didn't find the other shed, but I did manage to find two red fox skulls.  Unfortunately both are missing their canines, but they're still a good addition to my skull collection. 

Last week I was at a different park and we found what appears to be a horse or donkey jaw in the woods.  Amazingly, both halves of the jaw were still connected and a lot of the teeth were intact.  Usually mice and other small woodland creatures chew on bones and teeth to take in calcium.  Pretty cool. 

Its always a nice day when you can just wander in the woods and find whatever nature leaves for you.