Elise Anderson

Welcome back, I wish I had more to share with you guys this week. It has been pretty slow, I continued the process of lifting the feathers and setting them down to make them lay more smoothly. After I got really sick of doing that I went online and looked at more ideas for my habitat, but given the amount of time I did not think that I could have one built in just one week.  So, for now the quail is on a wire stand in the flying position and I think that is just how I will keep it considering I am not very happy with the result. So this week instead of working on my quail I helped my dad keep up with his pile of mounts he has by doing some European mounts for him, which I like doing much better than the quail mounting. It is much simpler and I already know how to do that so the process was much quicker. 

Welcome back everyone! This has been a week of finishing touches for my project. The quail is fully mounted and in the flying position that I wanted it to be in. Unfortunately, due to the fact that one of the wings was broken, the quail looks a little weird on the fly. I tried to re position it to make it look more natural but I was worried I would break more bones in the process.  To be quite honest, I have struggled a lot with this bird, this last week was spent just trying to get all of the feathers to lay down naturally again. This process requires me to use a tweezers to lift up the feathers and lay them back down just a few at a time. This is a very tedious process that I found frustrating.  Overall, this project has taught me a lot so far, not only about taxidermy but about being patient. I think that it was not the best idea to mount a quail as my first bird, they are so small and just the smallest mistakes can make a big impact. My dad and I struggled through t...

Welcome back! I am very excited to say that the quail is mounted and in a flying position. There were a few minor details that I did not mention in my last blog that all came together to make the finishing product. As I have said before the bones on these birds are very frail, to give the head some more strength I filled it in with molding clay all the way into the eye sockets. The clay in the eye sockets are what kept the glass eyes in place. As you can see in the picture, the wires that I placed in the wings and legs allowed me to shape the bird into a flying position. Once the bird was in the position that I wanted I taped down the wings to keep the feathers aligned. Then I had to start a more tedious part of this project, after I had used the hair dryer to fluff up the feathers they got all out of line so I had to use a small metal hook to lay down all of the feathers back to their more natural looking positions. This took me a long time because of the layers upon layers of feat...

Another very busy week of taxidermy! In my last blog I told you guys a little bit about my struggles skinning the quail and making the forms myself. Well, lets just say that the struggling did not end there. This week was the actual fitting of the quail to the form and it was a very tight fit. To actually prepare the bird for mounting you have to dip the already wet bird into a solution of lacquer to remove the water from the wings and proceed to use a hair drier to fluff up the feathers. Honestly when I first saw the wet feathers on the form I did not think that this would turn our very well.  By the looks of it, there were not very many feathers at all, and to me they looked mangled. Next, I ran a piece of wire through each leg and each wing to give them support and to make the limbs easier to move. I put a big bend in the legs to tuck them under and straightened the wing wires to make it look like the quail was flying. Next week I will finish shaping the quail and...