Quote from: Capt long beard on September 10, 2023, 05:43:20 PM
As far as taxidermy work goes #1 is my favorite but they're all good
I agree. The first one had one flaw. It was missing its right scapular (shoulder feather) tract. I borrowed one from the wing/tail mount one. The smoke one on the other hand had lots of problems that I didn't notice until it was ready to mount. It had a near perfect right side, which, is not the show side unfortunately. I had already set the pose and would have been difficult to tear apart and change the pose. The problems were hard yellow scabs all over that caused the feathers to not co operate, a deformed wing, which, left the wing feathers messed up, it was missing a lot of the over tail covert feathers on the show side. I shot it at 13 yards and it had blood matted feathers in its upper neck. I cleaned the blood off of the white feathers and froze it.
When I went to mount it, it had a lot of missing feathers on the upper neck. So, I had to cut and patch it, causing me to have to pull the neck up higher than natural to minimize the damage, thus causing the whole skin to be somewhat unnaturally pulled forward. Kind of a bummer for a somewhat rare bird.
