Hi, my name is Angel Bird. I’m spending the majority of July in Tucson, Arizona doing a Forensic Entomology internship. My internship just started on July 5th, therefore this is my first blog for my first week. When I first got here, my mentor Christina took me to see a fox that had died just a few days previous to my arrival. After I took some pictures and wrote some notes, we went and saw a bear that died last year. Nothing but bones, hide, and fur remained. There were
a lot of Hide Beetles around him, but that was the only bug action left. His pelvic bone was broken in half making it hard to tell the gender. Next week, I’m planning on putting the bones together in the lab so I can get a full look at it to see if I can answer the questions that many autopsies answer: What gender it was, what it’s ethnicity was, how big it was, how old it was, how it died, etc.
On the 7th, Christina and her co worker Sue took me to find a dead cow that one of the ranchers put down, but we ended up finding a dead horse. Again, nothing but some hair, hide, and bones remained. Right in the center of its remains was a pile of maggots and casings. There were beetles and larvae everywhere. I got some tweezers and began putting the maggots and beetles into 2 different containers. I am now raising the maggots to adulthood to see what they end up being (adults are always easier to identify) and the beetles went into the freezer so the next day I could display them. On day 3, I got to display my beetles and solve some fictional crime scenes created by my mentor.
On day 4, I got to go check out my fox again to see how it was decomposing. Due to it being submerged in water for a certain period of time, there was no bug activity whatsoever. His body was stiff, and his flesh and fur were still 100% in tact. 
That concludes my first week here at Research Ranch!
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