This week has seen me complete my first taxidermy project in almost 9 months, yikes! I will tell you all about it just a moment, but first;
You may remember from my previous blog post that I was working on an exciting project called ‘Bowie’ – the Eurasian Eagle Owl (Bubo bubo).
He had an unusual eye defect since birth that sadly made him blind in his left eye. It gives the appearance of his pupil being ‘split’ in to an interesting and highly unique shape.
This has sadly been the only project prior to this week that I have been able to complete, due to the chaotic house move and complications with my new workshop that nearly became an arc with all of this wet weather we’ve had in the UK this year!
But now it’s finally ready, I am so excited to announce I am back to making more taxidermy, hurrah!
It’s not been the warmest of welcomes back to the craft if I am honest. I had a lot of excitement and anticipation in equal measure about getting behind the taxidermy workbench after all of these months.
My first two projects were complete failures, which made me feel very deflated and questioned my skillset a bit! If nothing else, it’s a kindly reminder of the volatile nature that working with biological material brings with it.
The first Fieldfare I worked with on Monday, sadly had too much feather loss to work with. I dusted myself off an defrosted another right away that looked in much better condition. Despite the faux perfection of the exterior, the interior was a different story.
Sadly, it was very freezer burned (Meaning that too much moisture has leached from the carcass over many years of being in the deep freeze!) yet, it had remarkable fat reserves. This bird sadly perished as a result of the cold snap, known as the ‘beast from the east’ back in 2018, so it must have been eating berries like there was no tomorrow to boost it’s chances of surviving the extreme cold.
The combination of excess fat that I have to rigorously clean and very fragile, dry skin from the freezer burn, means the skin was just falling apart in my hands. The skin itself ended up in more than 3 pieces due to massive tears in the skin and I took the decision to abort the project and keep it in the freezer for ‘spares and repairs’.
By the time Wednesday came around, I was feeling very anxious about the third and last Fieldfare that I excavated from my freezer stock. Although it was the worst looking condition out of the three I had, it turned out to be the only workable one, thank goodness!
I plan on making a bit of a snowy winter scene for this one, hopefully with a hawthorn berry eating redwing to accompany him – if all goes to plan, of course!
