Elise Anderson

Welcome back, taxidermy has really taken off this week. For a while I have been doing mostly busy work preparing for that actual mounting of the quail. I am on track with my planning and will have this all mounted with plenty of time to create a habitat or a creative way to display it. So I started off by fleshing and skinning the quail. The ones that we had thawed out were very beat up, they had holes from dog bites and broken bones from the transporting process.  Skinning these birds was much more difficult than I anticipated, the skin is very, very thin and I would be lying if I said I didn't cut a few holes. One of the wings was completely broken so that made the process of removing the skin off of the wings without further damage quite difficult. The first bird I started on was too beat up from dogs to work with so I decided to use the other quail we had instead, but this one does not have as nice of tail feathers, but at least both of its legs are intact. After the s...

Week three has been full of tasks for this project! The form is fully shaped and ready for a bird to fit on it. I have thawed and frozen the bird a few different times because I really need like two days in a row to complete my next step of actually getting the quail onto the form, so I am hoping to get this done within the next week. I am right on track with my planning now as I have been watching videos on the shaping of the head and neck and becoming well prepared for the big step next week. I have chosen the eyes I want to use for the quail and found a few pieces of wood that would go very well for the base/habitat for my mount. It has been mostly busy work for me so far. I really just need a full day with nothing going on to really sit down and get all of the little pieces put together. Next week I should have some more pictures of the progress I've made!