Miscellaneous dead things

This is a post of random dead things I've come across in the past few weeks...dead things being one of the main things of interest one runs across during winter/early-spring walks! (I know spring is farther along now, but I'm behind.)

This flicker was found inside an abandoned house in Warren County a couple of weeks ago. It looks to be surrounded by dried yew berries. Maybe it wandered in and couldn't get out, and/or maybe it was cached by a squirrel!

These next three were all found in Ocean County this month. Skunks have tiny, delicate feet, which is also reflected in their tiny tracks. This foot belonged to half a skunk I found near a predator burrow (fox? coyote?).

This dead pine snake was brought to my attention by a turkey vulture that was eating it in the middle of a large, wide-open grassland. It didn't smell and was very cryptic, so I was pretty astonished that the vulture had found it. The only visible damage to the snake was a smooshed-in head, so I wonder if the vulture killed it (maybe it had come out of hibernation too early and was sluggish), or if it had died last October when the field was mowed (maybe would have looked more weather-beaten), or maybe just keeled over (do snakes have heart attacks?). This is a threatened species in NJ, and I see a lot of them out in the fields, so mowing during the warmer months would not help in any case. Many of the snakes I find are 6 feet long, so this was a fairly young one, I'm guessing.

Deer skulls are an all-too-common sight in any NJ woodland. But this one has an extra tooth! Looks like a very old deer - the teeth (even the extra one) have lots of wear. Maybe this extra tooth contributed to its demise? I'm not a dentist, but it looks sort of painful. Compare with normal deer skull below.

Half an acorn

I've been finding a lot of half-acorns lately.

This was a rediculously productive year for the red oak tree in my yard. In October, there was a solid carpet of acorns on the ground beneath it, and that was after an entire garbage bag was carted away for other uses (feeding woodrats). The squirrels (and my sheep) have gradually thinned out this acorn layer until there is now mainly just a carpet of acorn shells below.


But there are also chunks of acorn meats. Lots of them. Mostly the lower (pointier) half, with the upper (fatter) part missing, chewed off. Each morning I've been gathering these meats and feeding them to the sheep - about enough to fill my two cupped hands. And by the next morning there is a whole new crop of nut meats for the gathering.


My theory was that the fat end of the acorn (the part that is missing from most of the meats) might be more nutritious. Maybe during super mast years, the squirrels just eat just the good parts and leave the rest. Kind of like the brown bears that eat just the skin of the salmon. But this diagram (below) makes it seem like the fat end isn't so different from the pointy end, and the pointy end even has more goodies, like the root. But you never know. In any case, this phenomenon (if it happens in the woods, too) probably provides a steady source of acorn meats over the winter for other animals during big mast years. Even when the squirrels have hidden them all last fall.