Fourth Saturday

The topic of today's post is dead animals!


I knew I wanted to stuff dead birds the minute I heard my (future) adviser mention it during a presentation he gave during my freshmen seminar.  I didn't actually start until the spring semester of my sophmore year.  My adviser* who knew how to prepare study skins, made our** GA learn how to prepare study skins, and he taught us.  I remember my first bird, a juvenille white throated sparrow...it was terrible.  The meticulous notes I took while our GA did not serve me any good.  I was too heavy handed and tore many holes in the sides, managed to cut a leg off, and removed the tail when I was trying to remove the viscera sac.  I was so stressed out but somehow it was salvaged thanks to some strategizing with the GA.  After that bird, it got better.  I took everything very slowly, and tried to not use my scalpel whenever possible.  Sometimes I stuffed with my friends and sometimes I stuffed by myself.  Although it was nice to chat with friends, nothing beat stuffing alone.  Whenever I stuffed by myself, it was magical.  I would start log onto my Pandora and usually play some opera while I gathered my supplies.

Nothing beat the sound of beautiful singers while gently scraping away the fascia connecting the skin and muscles.  I just went into a zone where nothing mattered except the bird and breathing through my mouth***.  It was magical.  My favorite part of the whole process is probably scraping everything away and working up to the wings so that the bird is opened up and you can see the body under the feathers.  My least favorite part is sewing up after the cotton is in.  The cotton gets in the way and so do the feathers.  Mammals are a different story, I hate opening them.  Unlike birds, whose feathers grow in tracks and can be easily pushed away, mammal fur is every where and wont separate.  What I do like about mammals is that I can be a little more heavy handed because they have thicker skin.  You also get to peel the pelt away from the body which is totally awesome!!  I just wish that we had armatures to mount the pelts instead of me just using a dowel to stiffen them and stuffing them with cotton.  My boss's boss said he'd introduce me to the study skin/skeleton preppers, so hopefully they can teach me a thing or two that I can bring back and teach my friends.







*My adviser says he is no good at preparing study skins so that's why he didn't teach us.
**My GA taught me and two of my friends.  He was also the GA for the lab I was taking that my adviser taught.
***Some of the birds smelled like raw chicken and it was weird associating something that I eat with the dead bird in front of me.