there's plenty of bones to be found online, but there's a certain joy in being able to clean and process and display them yourself - you just gotta find them! now, I don't hunt or kill any of the specimens I collect, I work on a vulture culture basis. they're all already dead by the time I find them. there's a number of places you can look for this kind of thing, so let me run you through my preferred searching spots. one thing you must check before collecting animal carcasses, however, is the laws surrounding it in your area. some animals are protected and cannot be collected, so make sure you're looking into local laws before you start collecting anything!

xx✸ roadkill
easily the easiest and fastest method for finding carcasses, though they tend to be in pretty rough shape. any backwoods road is perfect for this kind of thing, somewhere that's near treelines and has no street lights. while it's usually directly on the side of the road, it's sometimes worth venturing a couple of metres into the treeline as well to see if anything made it off the road before it passed.

xx✸ hiking
my personal favourite! get outdoors, get into nature, and get searching. check the legalities first, of course - if you're hiking in national parks then you likely won't be allowed to remove anything. little woodland trails or unofficial trails through wild land is the perfect place to look for bones. some great places to look if you're doing this are creek beds and lakes and bases of cliffs. animals may have fallen into lakes and drowned, gotten caught in creek beds, or fallen and died at the base of steep cliffs.

xx✸ livestock disposal pits
if you have farms nearby, often livestock that dies on the farm will be disposed of in a big ol pit. around here, sometimes farmers will let you take carcasses for pet food or bones, so it's always worth asking! worst they'll do is say no

xx✸ owl pellets
owls spit out pellets of indigestible bits of their meals, which includes bones! you can buy these online or you can find them yourself - they will tend to collect around one roost spot for the owl, so if you find one, keep hunting around and return to that spot for more! this is a great way to find little bones and small rodent skulls

xx✸ powerlines
walking under powerlines is a great place to find birds and bats, particularly bigger ones. birds don't tend to get electrocuted, but the bigger species are more at risk of accidentally touching two wires and can be zapped and fall as a result.