Helen, congratulations on having joined the Grand Cadre of Roadkill
Picker-Uppers.

Your first lesson in roadkill recovery is to be a little more picky. Don't
bother with anything that is squashed flat, because -- well, can you
imagine what the condition of the tiny little squirrel bones is actually
going to be, if a car tire smashed the body flat? What would the condition
of your foot bones be if a car tire ran over your foot?

So what you do instead is this:

(1) Always have a 5-gallon bucket in the trunk of your car, along with a
tarp (4' X 8' standard size will do), a flatback shovel, and a good pair
of rubber gloves ("Playtex Living" or heavier) with long cuffs.

(2) Keep your eye out for roadkill that looks non-flattened. More or less
freshly killed is the best, but bloated up can work so long as you're real
careful not to let it explode when you're handling it. These animals will
also almost always have some fractures -- either to the head or to one
side of the body, because they were in fact hit by cars. However, if you
look closely you may be able to determine that the damage is not to the
head and if that's the case, then that's the one you go for
preferentially.

(3) Be aware that fleas, ticks, and body lice may not have abandoned the
carcass if you find it fresh enough. Don't let your hair touch the cadaver
and don't let the cadaver touch your clothing or body. HOld it out away
from you as you pick it up.

(4) Be aware also that dead bodies, if they squirt juices or gasses at
you, can give you a whole array of unhappy sicknesses, including but not
limited to salmonella, girardia, cave fever, valley fever, and E. coli.

(5) Have a plan for how to deal with the body once you get it home, BEFORE
you go pick it up -- you want the smelly thing out of your car as soon as
possible, to begin with.

(6) If you try to skeletonize a small animal (i.e. raccoon-sized or down)
by burying it, you will never find most of the bones and the effort will
then be much less worthwhile than it could be. The bones will be lost in
the dirt or in the manure. Ditto by burying. So you don't do these things,
but instead provide yourself with a bucket out back somewhere nobody is
going to mind the smell (the smell will only last a month or so), and you
put the carcass in the bucket or maybe the cut-off bottom of a 50-gallon
drum. Then you fill the container up with water and you take boards and
you cover it and you weight the boards down with cement blocks or bricks
so that dogs can't get in there and mess with it. And then you leave it
for one year. This is a technique called "wet maceration".

After one year, you first go get a piece of hardware cloth -- the smallest
mesh that is larger than window screen. The hardware cloth should be as
wide as the width of your container, and square or rectangular in shape.
Then you put the hardware cloth near the container and you tip the
container over -- as slowly as your strength allows -- so that all the
contents of the container go onto the hardware cloth.

You will have your rubber gloves on for this, of course, so then you squat
down there and pick through all the offal by hand, feeling for anything
that feels like a bone. You put all those parts that you find into an
empty bucket. Then you go get the hose and put it on fairly slow, and you
use the hose and your fingers to winnow through the offal until you are
sure that you've found all that can be found. You then rinse out the
maceration container and pour it off through the screen also, and again
feel for skeletal parts.

If the item you're macerating is as small as a squirrel, then instead of
hardware cloth you should actually use window screen, because the little
carpal bones and the tailbones and other small bones of small animals are
so small that they'll go through the hardware cloth.

This is in my opinion the best way to make skeletons. The downside is the
smell. What you tell your neighbors is that somebody must have hit a dog
on the road ("it ain't me, baby").

You can also "do" a small animal by simply laying the carcass next to a
red-ant hill, if you live in country where there are carnivorous ants.
They will clean it up for you just beautiful, although you may find some
of the very smallest bones missing -- hard to control -- try putting the
carcass out on a piece of window screen, and you'll also have to encage it
somehow to keep dogs or coyotes from taking it.

Others on this list will probably have their own methodologies and
suggestions to share....but this is how I have done it for many a year,
and got away with it, neighbors and E. coli and all. Cheers -- Dr. Deb



> I've just brought home my first corpse. It's a squirrel that has been
> lying around for a while and has dried out - either that, or the car
> that hit it squashed it flat.
>
> So now what? What's the best way to retrieve the skeletal material? Bury
> it? How long would it need given that it's summer and I'm in Toronto and
> therefore likely to be 20-30C degrees for three or four months?
>
> Boil it? My family already thinks I'm weird - I don't think I'm ready to
> boil it in my soup pot.
>
> Eve
>
>
>