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

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.

Squirrel in the Living Room!

Pleased to announce the results of my first attempt at a life-sized taxidermy mount!

Ooooooo!

I spent most of July 4th hanging out with friends in my backyard; grilling, celebrating, and putting this guy together. Lord Julius IV: Order of the StumpTail a.k.a Mr. Fuzzynuts was found whilst cleaning out a basement  freezer, leftover from last fall's grey squirrel season. He had taken some serious shotgun damage to his right eye socket and was missing most of his tail to begin with, but I figured what the heck good enough to practice a first piece! And so the squirrel was thawed, pelted, and pickled. 

Pickling

At this point I've skinned enough small mammals that it was fairly simple to get the hide off and mix the very acidic hide preserving solution. Since I didn't have a specific pose for the mount in mind, a case incision was used to remove the skin in one piece. A squirrel hock-to-squirrel hock cut was made, passing under the base of the tail, along the grey-white fur line. This was to ensure that the final stitches wouldn't be seen by the audience.  After about an hour the skin  -including all 4 feet, ears, nose and whiskers- was freed from the body. It peeled off a bit like a tube sock. As the skin soaked overnight, I picked out a pretty generic mannikin, or foam taxidermy form, and several sizes of glass rodent eyes. 

One big mistake I made overall was failing to measure the whole animal from nose to the base of the tail, and the width and length of the eyes prior to skinning. When the foam body arrived and I excitedly began putting the skin on, it quickly became obvious that the hide (basically sopping wet after being rinsed/neutralized of acid and coated/rinsed again of hide tanning agent) was about 3 inches too long to fit snuggly against the form. The squirrel's rear end hung limply off the foam body like a tattered cloth. In addition the arms and legs of the animal looked disproportionately long when affixed to the nubs of the mannikin. Admittedly, I was feeling pretty discouraged at this point. Despite reading and re-reading the Mannual, there seemed to be just too many fine nuances to taxidermy art to simply describe to a novice. For example: just exactly how much bone and tendon should one leave intact in the paws in order to balance shape, correct preservation, and still avoiding rot? I sat back for a while and debated how best to proceed. However, time was limited as the hide began to dry to the form and needed to be shaped into a final lifelike position...

Tanned,  hydrated hide and mannikin with foot glued back on

While struggling to mount the hide I stupidly snapped off the bottom right paw of the mannikin. The moderately brittle foam crumbled apart in my hand and all I could do was sit back and groan in frustration. While waiting for the glue to dry on the severed foot my mind scrolled through all the animal-stuffing techniques I'd been reading about. Around the house there was a decent collection of wire, glues, cardboard, and clay, but I didn't have the straw or sawdust old timers used for making taxidermy forms. As I worked outside on the deck, friends stopped by to inspect my progress and I smiled awkwardly, pretending to be in control of the situation.

After a good half hour of thinking it over I came up with a plan of action. Basically, it was a crude combination of all the methods I had been reading or youtube-ing. At this stage the face skin had been drying in place nicely and I didn't want to undo it. The mannikin was wearing the skin like a hooded cloak. I went back and snapped off all four paws. Then I used 22 gauge wire to fashion four 6" long arm and leg frames which were stuffed back up under the hide, in its "armpits". I began stuffing cotton balls as far as I could up into the armpits, trying to hold the wire in place without glue. Surprisingly it worked as I had hoped and the little beast's right forearm came back to life in proportion (more or less) and semi flexible.... there was hope after all!

I excitedly finished the other three limbs in the same manner. Bulking up his waist with cotton was the next step, probably the most fun and amusing part of the project. I then sculpted the overall shape of the animal by pushing and sculpting the pelt and cotton around by hand. When I was satisfied with the body composition I gently sewed up the original incision sight. I also worked the ears, nose, whiskers and lips into their final shape. His right eyelid was long gone so I couldn't get really creative with eye expression, but his lower lip was a different story. I gave him a comical gasping expression, representing my first attempt at mounting a small animal that was full of unexpected challenges.

All in all I spent close to 5 hours straight taxidermy-ing this grey squirrel. Later that night I realized we had tanned a spare tail from another squirrel my hubby had also shot last season. I carefully fed a piece of wire into it and tied it tightly to the mount's tail stub.  I adjusted the tail to a pleasant S shape and the piece instantly seemed to take on a new life. "Squirrel in the living room!" I thought at last.

 The next day I was looking the mount over and came to the realization that he needed teeth. At first I tried clipping the teeth out of an old vole skull, but they turned out to be much too small to fill the squirrel's mouth convincingly. (I also had painted the inside of the mouth greyish-brown, along with a few patches of missing fur) The solution was clearly to make some incisors out of sculpy, and after a few layers of paint he had some fairly convincing dentures. Just a hint cartoony, but that's how I like it.


Lord Julius IV, Order of the StumpTail

Dental Plan

patch of fur slip :(

Party UP

Humble Beginnings

As a child I was always fascinated by the macabre. My first encounter with taxidermy was in a bait & tackle shop with my dad. I don't recall exactly how old I was, but we'd walk into this shop and right in the entryway was a gorgeous stuffed mountain goat. He appeared to be strolling in, right along with the customers.You could dig your fingers into his thick fur, touch his knobby horns, or stare into his lifelike glass eyes. The store also had a full mount snarling brown bear, deer and moose heads and dozens of fish. But the trotting, friendly, white goat was my favorite.

My parents would take my younger brother and I to the Harvard Museum of Natural History  where I'd spend hours walking the collections of stuffed mammals, birds, insects, and ocean creatures. It was so impressive to see the exotic menagerie, but I wanted to know how They did it. "How does one stuff an entire tiger?" My 8 year old self vowed to find out...

20 years later & I'm in a good place. Stable income and a loving boyfriend who supports and even contributes to my strange hobbies.  He is an avid hunter (I've gone on a few expeditions as well) and has a chest freezer with several deer hides he wants to learn to tan and make into clothing. Thus, over the last few years I've been doing a good deal of self-directed online research into preserving hides and taxidermy techniques.

There are many steps involved in processing even a small animal hide. After slowly and carefully removing the skin from the body it must be salted, scraped or fleshed out, pickled in an acid bath, fleshed again, briefly re-pickled, neutralized, dried, tanned with more chemicals, rinsed, dried and worked in a manner that breaks the skin's protein structure to produce a soft, cloth-like material. And that's JUST for a flat pelt.  Molding and mounting the pelt over a pre-made animal form to create a "stuffed" taxidermy piece is another skill set entirely. So, suffice to say I learned pretty quickly that one does not simply Get Into taxidermy!