When I was thirteen I spotted a large dead crow outside the library window at school. I got to school early the next day with a shoe box and it was still there. I scooped it up and hid it in the locker in my classroom until home time. During the day my friends and I began to notice an alarming number of ants crawling around over the lockers.
At home time I grabbed the box once no one was looking and took it home, where I buried it by a tree. My plan was to dig it up again in two months so I would have a complete skeleton. Sadly I forgot where it was buried.
My next attempt to develop a dead bird collection was about a year later. I found another dead bird, possibly a starling, and put it in a glass jar. This time I would watch the putrefaction and decay like a morbid scientist. This jar sat on my shelf for six months. With no air it just slowly turned to bony, feathery sludge. One day, when several friends were round, one of them opened the jar. The smell was nasty, and I chucked it in the bin.
That was the end of my collection!
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