update on the dead seagull from *december*!!!
(tw for dead animal pics/description, and pics of the same animal decomposed, slightly gory)
on december 17th, 2021, i found a juvenile herring gull on the side of the road just hours after its death. i have no idea what the cause of death was, but it wasn’t emaciated, and there was no external injuries or defects that i could see (i couldn’t get too close of a look, since i didn’t have my gloves on me when i found it). today, four months later, i found it again!
i was not expecting the corpse to still be there. it was in the middle of a residential area (literally on the curb outside someone’s house) and it was also right at a bus stop for young children, but today i checked and there it was! it had been buried in a snow bank all winter, and with not a lot of scavengers around and decomposer bugs all gone for the winter, it stayed shockingly intact. the only thing missing was the cranium, which i am very curious as to where it went, because the bill (both mandibles) was still intact, but i guess i’ll never find out lmao
anyways here’s a couple pics from when i first found it:
it was a very fresh corpse, hadn’t been there that morning. i found it around 3:30 pm. i wasn’t able to check body temperature because i didn’t have gloves on me and didn’t want to touch anything other than the flight feathers, but rigor mortis hadn’t set in.
and here’s a few pictures from today:
it was *shockingly* intact. being buried under the snow all winter definitely helped to preserve it, along with the lack of decomposers and scavengers due to the area and timeframe. all the skin and scales on the legs and feet was intact, and the webbing of the feet was even still there. you could see the bones of the wing, but there was still enough ligaments left for the wing to open and stretch without too much resistance.
there were definitely some ugly bits (i honestly have no idea what that piece of meat at the back of the head used to be, and i still don’t know where the rest of the skull went) but overall it was a very cool find. i was not expecting to be able to see it decompose like this, given it was in the middle of a neighborhood, but it’s super cool either way!
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“I need a look that says ‘i live in a hut and hang out with the devil’ but like... in a classy way”
✦shop✦
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I think I might post my bone jewelry on here just because I like the vulture culture side of Tumblr a lot (I haven’t shipped anywhere out of Canada before but as long as the laws align to allow me to without issue I’m okay with that)
My Instagram is vulturegems if anyones curious tho
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