I tripped over something sinister in the bush one day and.......

As an environmental consultant I am contracted to do many and varied a job in many and varied a location. On any given week I could be in the middle of the Gulf country in Queensland, at the top of Western Australia in the far north Kimberley, down in the deep south or just fluffing around the Perth metro area. 

These days, more often than not I work alone. I love it: often alone but never lonely. However, sometimes the solitude can catch up to you and it overwhelms my effervescent mind. When this happens it can get a little creepy. Oddly though, I find it far less creepy out in the middle of nowhere than in the middle of suburbia and there is a damn good reason for that.

Take Herdsman Lake for instance! It is a massive 400 ha swamp not more than spitting distance from the Perth CBD. It is surrounded by the industrial behemoth that is Osborne Park and an enormous ensemble of high-density and low-socioeconomic apartment style housing estates. Suffice is to say that crime is not unheard of and wildlife is not the only thing you would expect to find in this peri-urban swampland.

A beautiful urban wetland it is; among other things.

 

I have walked around that lake 100 times looking for tiger snakes and every single time I expect to trip over a dead body lying cold, pale and still among the typha reeds and couch grass. On more than one occasion I have happened across small collections of ladies underwear: were they stolen from the clothes line of a nearby house by some pervert or were they all that was left of a far more sinister undertaking??

Hopefully, by now you can appreciate how I felt the other day when I came across a near-disintegrating child's Ugg boot not meters from a collection of bones lying in a depression surrounded by impenetrable swampland vegetation. 

At first I did not think much of it and proceeded to pick through the bones in an attempt to determine the species that once they were. As an ecophysiologist my functional morphology leaves a little to be desired but, despite being bleached by the sun and desiccated to within an inch of their existence, they were far to dense too be the frame work of an animal capable of flight. The disproportionately large scapular was curious, but the spinose process was really throwing me. It was the part of the pelvic girdle (not shown) that made my heart sink.

In my mind I joined the dots: the booty, the depression, the setting. Immediately I thought to call the police, but I hesitated: how embarrassing would that be? Dr Mitch Ladyman, 25 years a biologist and he can't distinguish a human bone from that of another lower vertebrate!!!! Shame on him.

Difficult to see in the photo, save for the dense collection of detritus, but that is a clearly discernable depression and the log over-top has not moved for years, if not decades. Clearly, something had been buried here causing the soil to subside as it decomposed.

To save face, I had to investigate further. So carefully I scratched around in the depression, pushing the desiccated detritus to one side. I hit something hard; crisp even. It was immovable. A little more fossicking revealed what was clearly a ball joint apex of something like a thigh bone. Not big, but big enough. That was that!!!! I called the police........