The Burpham Corvid

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!