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[carrioncrowprince]

"oh neat, there's an antler at the bottom of the creek!"

"weird how much resistance there is pulling it out, maybe it's caught on a root?"

"OH SHIT OH SHIT OH SHIT"

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It’s the weekend! And that means I had some time to get a closer look at the taxidermy owl that was being given away for free in my apartment lobby.

I mean just look at this boy! How could I resist?

He is very obviously a Great Horned Owl, which just so happens to be the official bird of my Province. And the first thing I did after picking this guy up was double-check the laws about possessing raptor parts, and best I can tell is having a pre-existing owl mount is just fine.

I have no practical experience with taxidermy, but I’m hoping to patch him up.

The main issue is that his left wing is broken. Or more accurately almost completely ripped off. The skin on the underside of the wing connecting to the body is intact, but the skin under the scapulars is just barely attached.

I couldn’t get great photos as I didn’t want to damage the skin any further. But you can at least see that it’s stuffed with straw, and one of the wire apertures holding it up. I couldn’t tell through my gloves if the wire is snapped or just bent.

I couldn’t tell much about the state of the skin through the gloves (I need to grab some nitrile gloves next time I’m out), but I would say it’s almost but not quite paper dry.

His face is a little wonky, but far from the worst I’ve seen on older taxidermy. The plaster in the beak seems a bit sloppy and is crumbling.

Here’s some more pictures of the wire aperture. The end on his head is usually covered by the feathers. I’m assuming the wires protruding the tail were meant to hold it up but just need to be repositioned back into place.

The base is made of wood, covered in some sort of plaster or epoxy, and hollow. I was hoping to find a date or something in there, but no such luck.

So far all I’ve done is start a slow and careful wipe-down to get all the dust off of him.

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[carrioncrowprince]

I Will Be Made a New Creature - Brendon Burton

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my work for the taxidermy championship, a gray parrot, and its skull in the process of processing

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Gun store near my house

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A mountain lion cub feasting on a mountain goat carcass. Photographed by Stay Wild Media.

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I really liked the Grévy zebra from the Africa hall at the museum in Bern, he had such a sweet face. The zebra and the eland antelope were made sometime between 1944 and 1947 and they have some age-related damage (like the cracks in the zebra's skin on the flank and neck), but they still look very good!

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cant wait for consistent warm weather to clean the skull i literally found on the side of a road

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Skull of a white-tailed deer with deformed antlers By: Leonard Lee Rue III From: The World of the White-tailed Deer 1962

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A very large and unique-looking coydog. The long, slender features suggests possibly collie or sighthound in the mix.

(Source)

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“The Museum of Zoology has a number of skins from the Carolina Parakeet; all but one collected in the 1830’s and sold to bird collectors in the UK as study skins. But one specimen in particular stands out, and not because it’s a taxidermied mount. The mounted Carolina Parakeet is a particularly characterful specimen – you can’t help but anthropomorphise its cheeky expression, you feel that this is a bird you would have got-on with. But it belies a sad truth; this specimen was collected in 1883 in central Florida, the last stronghold.”

- Excerpt from “Carolina Parakeet, Conuropsis carolinensis” by Mathew Lowe.

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Saw a cool mural today

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Jacob’s Ra.m I got for myself

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Source: Chad Davis on Instagram (chadryandavis)