The Burpham Corvid
I recently visited the small village of Burpham, nearby to
Arundel on the South Coast of England, for a walk with my girlfriend and
family. The village is set nearby to the river Arun and (importantly!) near the
RSPB wildlife reserve, which is home to a number of species of bird.
We
visited the village to collect a number of geocaches
(which my girlfriend, Soph, has written a blog about here),
which involves finding a number of hidden containers from supplied GPS
co-ordinates. However when approaching one of the geocaches, I instead spotted an
incredibly well preserved skull, which was instantly recognisable of that of a
medium sized bird (Figure 1).
Figure 1: The Bird
Skull as it was discovered in Burpham
The
skull displayed a large brain case and long narrow beak (Figure 2). Although
these features would be instantly recognisable to a Bird specialist, I am not
as confident on my avian identification skills as I am my mammalian
Identification, so I could not confidently identify the skull at first glance.
However once I sent the pictures to the bird specialist at my university, the
features mentioned above were shown to be indicative of a bird from the Corvid
Family.
Figure 2: The Corvid
Skull with scale.
To
take the identification of the skull further I took the skull into the stores
of Bournemouth University, and compared it to a number of Corvid skulls. The
stores housed three different bird skulls from the Corvid family, magpie, jackdaw and crow. The magpie and jackdaw craniums, although displayed a large brain case, show significant differences in the beak sizes, with the cranium
found at Burpham showing a longer, slender beak than the two shown in figure 3.
Figure 3: Comparison
of the Jackdaw and Burpham Cranium (Top) and Magpie and Burpham Cranium (Bottom).
The
final comparison I made was that of crow (Corvus
spp.). Although there was a size difference between the two specimens, this
was the closest match, with large similarities being shown in the brain case. The
crow from the reference collection was that of a female, with sexual
dimorphism being high in birds, it is possible that the Burpham cranium
represents a Male, accounting for the differentiation in size. However as I
have only compared against three corvid species it is also possible that the skull
could represent another ‘Crow sized’ corvid such as a rook, however I currently
have no reference to compare against.
Figure 4: Comparison
of the Crow and Burpham Cranium.
For
now the skull will remain as ‘Corivd, likely Crow’, however I hope to learn more about avian bone
in the future and will be exploring the resources out there for avian
archaeology in future blogs, so the Burpham Skull may make another appearance
soon!
