Feeling Chipper

I threw myself into chipmunks for the sake of an adorable little boy who hunted one down about a month ago. My boyfriend and I were actually visiting an old, local-ish, professional taxidermist who had made us a gorgeous black bear rug from last season. We visited his studio - a barn in the beautiful, autumn Western Mass countryside - and I was able to pick his brain about taxidermy methods and licsensure application info.

On our way out we happened upon the elder taxidermist's son and young grandson. The kid was proudly showing off the female chipmunk he just hunted with his own rifle. He pleaded with his grandpa to stuff it for him (his younger sister was horrified), but the man proclaimed "they're just too small, it can't be done. At least not by my old eyes." The boy was clearly dissapointed, but I excitedly jumped at the chance to prove my budding skills.

"I can do it!"  And so I claimed my first true hunter and customer.

So for the past few weeks I've been working on eastern chipmunks Tamias striatus. They are amazingly difficult to stuff successfully, given their diminutive size and thin skin.  It was easy to see why even experienced taxidermists would avoid them. In 3 weeks,  however,  I was able to mount 3 chipmunks - 2 of which came out good enough to post pictures of!

The following is a general breakdown of my technique:

Make a plan: Envision what the final piece will (hopefully) look like by drawing a few simple sketches. Sketching helps me center myself and get into art mode.

Organize your materials:  Mannikins of several sizes, 'munk pelt, wad of critter clay, cotton balls, instruments, needles & thread. A few things I wish I'd put in this photo are: small paint brushes, paint, glass eyes, and a product called "bird foot injection fluid".

Figure out how to the get pelt on the mannikin: As far as I can tell, and even according to the pro I spoke with, this often involves breaking the legs off the mannikin. This time it occoured to me to make subtle notches in the limbs to help them fit snugly back together. The little boy's chipmunk also had a bullet hole in one of its arm pits which turned out to be a great place to insert the severed forearms.

After the forearms are in place carefully insert the rest of the mannikin. (in the case of these 'munks the hind legs didn't need to be removed.) This is a difficult step and it is easy to fuck up and tear the wet skin or rip the fur out. 

Carve out the eye sockets of the form, insert black bubble eyes.

Using a combination of clay and cotton balls, I built up the brow, under eye, nose, ear bases, whisker roots, cheeks and lower jaw.  Using tweezers I insert small balls of clay or cotton under the wet skin and work them into shape. This is my favorite part of the taxidermy process; trying to create a lifelike expression. 

However I'm still trying to learn to add enough clay compensate for the natural shrinkage that occurs as the mount dries. Their faces look perfect at first, but begin to warp and tighten over the first several days post-creation. Adding to this dilema, when the skin is first mounted (and I double checked this with our bear rug maker) it should be sopping wet and workable, that is, saturated with water and slightly pudgier than it would be if still alive. Maintaining the look of realism through out the wet-to-dry process still needs to be mastered. 

So.... I got lazy stopped taking pictures of the final steps. That can wait for future posts. What's missing are positioning the paws and tail with clay and wire, injecting foot-preservation fluid (smells awful, a mask must be worn) into the paw pads, and painting a bit of color around the mouth and eyelids. Time it sit back and enjoy the fuzzy fruits of my labor. Thanks for reading :)

This one's pelt ripped. Patched it up with chicken-patterned paper.

Spooky & Kid Stuff

Rest in Peace, Mr. Balls.

Mr. Balls was your typical over-the-counter pet store hamster. Scientifically speaking, he was Mesocricetus auratus - the Syrian hamster. Outwardly, however, he was a rather poor specimen. He was small - barely 90 grams, and he had an underbite which caused his ever-growing rodent teeth to curl against each other in odd, tusk-like formations. His teeth were monitored and clipped into a respectable shape every few weeks throughout his hamstery life. Mr. Balls died at the age of 2 3/4 years. We held onto his body down in our carcass freezer for a long time. The day finally came when I felt confident enough at small animal mounting to thaw it out, remove and treat the pelt, and attempt to stuff it....

Firstly, I constructed a wire & cotton frame, somewhat like I had done with FunnyBunny.  This was done as the pelt was soaking in the pickling agent.

After a few days the pelt was ready to be carefully applied over the frame.

It took about 2 hours of arrangement, but I was able to mount with skin, add the eyes and a bit of clay for support, and set the piece to dry. As a finishing touch, I positioned the digits on his left paws to be throwing the Horns: 

The Faces of Progress

Just completed my fourth squirrel mount, which is also my fifth work of taxidermy for the summer! This piece, dubbed Wednesday,  I will confidently claim, turned out really really good:

Looking over the whole group, particularly the details of the faces, my progression in the hobby is most pleasing...lol to me. Perhaps most importantly, I am perfecting the early but vital step of removing the skin from the skull without damaging the inner ears, eyelids, whisker roots, nose and lips. Of these features, the eyelids are probably the most easily damaged and easily observable. On poor Lord Julius, for example, I skinned/fleshed the left side of his face respectably, but utterly butchered his right side:

Lord Juilius IV, Order of the StumpTail

Ouch!

However, Wednesday's eye-setting came out beautifully. Two distinct improvements in craftsmanship added to her success. Firstly, I carved the eye sockets much deeper into the mannikin before gluing the glass eyes in place. The epoxy-foam mannikins come with shallow eye sockets, but its up to the artist to detail them to the individual specimen in a (hopefully) realistic manner. The other new technique that worked well was stuffing the brow with tiny bits of cotton after I'd slid the hide more-or-less in place.


A few weeks after Julius, I got a roadkill connect that turned out to have been a lactating female with a pretty shitty quality pelt to begin with. However, for the sake of practice I took the animal and experimentally stuffed it pillow-style, without any sort of mannikin or wire frame, just to see what the final product would look like. She ended up essentially still looking like roadkill, but quite deserving of a place on the internet:

As for my third squirrel, I decided to get creative (I'm having a hard time convincing myself to make "normal" looking mounts) and pose him holding his own heart, preserved in a little jar. Thus, I carefully cut out his heart and preserved it in a small glass jar of 70% alcohol. The jar was an empty paint jar form the art supply store.  Now preserving rodent hearts in tiny jars is something I've been dabbling in since college. After 3 or 4 days/alcohol changes, the heart tissue, still submerged in EtOH, was fixed.

Things were going well on #3 until it was time to close up his ventral incision. The hide simply wasn't big enough, possibly because I'd gotten lazy and had let the hide dry out completely before rehydrating (soaking it in briny water overnight) and mounting it. But I was not discouraged, in fact this was the perfect excuse to make the final creation nice and strange. I debated between carving the exposed foam to look like the underlying anatomy or something a bit more.... whimsical.

With the recent success of FunnyBunny, I decided to take a similar route with this squirrel, i.e. to my trove of decoupage materials. A Victorian-like black & white flower-patterned sheet of paper was selected. I used just a small portion of the sheet and tore it up randomly to get the look I wanted. Next came the modge podging, which proceeded in two layers; a base layer of the less attractive paper scraps, followed by a select group of scraps carefully placed over the torso to give the impression of the rodent's original organs. In the end, it was a huge success:

He needs a name.

heart-in-a-jar

I carved him a pleasant smile.

And that brings us up to Wednesday, who is thus far the beauty of my collection. I crafted her in essentially the same manner as Julius; that is mannikin + cotton filler. In this case my boyfriend and I picked out an interesting mannikin in a climbing down, turning slightly to the left pose. One thing I prepped for was arm breakage. In this instance it occurred to me to try cutting off the mannikin's arms at the shoulders and inserting them into the skin's leg holes first. This actually turned out to be a great strategy and I was able to mount the hide fairly quickly.

There isn't much more to add to her story at the moment, though we are on the look out for the right base or log to put her on. Don't mind the cotton visible in the pics below, she's still drying. Other than some lower lip shrinkage and some hair-slip at the base of the tail, the finished piece looks fantastic. Wednesday also came with her own ear notches, which I think adds to her natural charm.

Funny Bunny

Minor update: After much feedback I decided to patch him up with some spare printed canvas:

From lawnmower victim to adorable desktop companion...

This tiny cottontail was an accidental victim of the grounds department where my bf and I work...he was thoughtful enough to acquire it for me ^.^

Here's something I'm quickly learning about taxidermy: tiny animals are fucking difficult. Their skin is very thin to begin with and the tanning process can ruin the strength if not done extremely carefully (I over-neutralized a squirrel pelt recently and large patches of fur fell out). Never-the-less this little fellow came out pretty good, minus the gaping tear in his right side. The rabbit kit was skinned, the feet and adorable little tail were left on, and into the pickle jar it went. The skin was so thin it clearly pickled through in only about 2 hours. 

A first I tried simply stuffing the sock-like bunny with just cotton balls, but it didn't hold much of a shape.  I pulled out most of the cotton balls, except for the neck and head which looked decent and was starting to dry in place. I then constructed a lovely little wire frame and messed with it and the cotton balls until, after a few solid hours of work, I had recreated the baby bunny.