When I shot my gobbler it rained the night/morning before. He was pretty damp. I am still a rookie so I like to save all of the trophy as I can, and was so nervous that his tail fan would not look good.
Here is a pic of the bird when I brought him home.
As you can see he was drenched, and his tail fan looked horrible. I had to try though, as I love the looks of fans.
So I got to work Friday night around 10:00. I did my jake fan first as it was dry. I believe he was missing one of his center tail feathers. but I filled it in. He turned out great, and is drying now. I liked the copper colored secondary feathers he had.
One thing that I learned on these is that there is a bone right in the center of the tail fan that the feathers attach too. I did not take the bone out of my first mount. On this one I took out the bone and got a lot more meat cut out and a flatter fan. I suggest doing this to anyone who is saving their fans.
After I got the jake finished up, I moved onto the gobbler. I was a bit nervous as it was soaked from the hunt. His tail fan looked very messed up, and I was worried.
I got it out, and started removing the meat. I had kept a decent mount of his secondary feathers as well. I did not do this so much on my first bird, so I was excited to see how it would look in the end. I did not have time the day I shot the bird to really get to check him out so I was excited to have a look.
I got the meat off, took out the center bone, and scraped all I could off to get it down to pretty much skin, and a little fat around the feathers. OK now what should I do. I figured that if I tried to mount it the way it was it would end up looking terrible. I got a brainstorm about drying the feathers out first. I ran inside and grabbed my wife's hair dryer.
The fan feathers and secondary feathers dried pretty quickly and the feathers stared to go back to normal and not look so jagged. I dried each individually then gave the whole thing a once over.
I laid it out on the cardboard, coincidently the same one I used to pattern my turkey guns, and got to work. I stretched the fan out and pinned the bottom feathers. It looked pretty decent, so I went to each feather and pinch/stroked them to get them to fall back in place.
Once this was all done, I went ahead and pinned them in place.
This is what I ended up with when it was all said and done.
There are still a few feather fibers I need to work with. His fan was a little rough to begin with, but was not terrible.
The materials I used to do this are as follows:
paring knife- (scraping meat/fat off)
fillet/boning knife- (cutting out tail bone, cutting off meat
large piece of cardboard- pinning fans on, I reuse the ones that I use to pattern
20 mule team borax- used for preserving fan
keystone light- celebrating the hunt
Just wanted to put this up, in case you guys get a gobbler and he is drenched. There is hope, and it only takes about 5 minutes extra if you want to preserve the fan. I also wanted to express how much nicer the fans look if you (1) save secondary feathers, (2) cut out the tail bone.
