Wayfaring and Wandering
Deer, Land, Training and Travel
Taxidermy Eagle Restoration – Conservation of a Different Nature
I’ve said before now that I am interested in conservation in all its forms. This is one of them.
A real passion of mine throughout my life has been taxidermy. I remember, as a kid, wandering round museums looking at the mounted up animals and imagining them coming to life. It’s a passion that I’ve carried through the years, and over the last few I’ve got involved in it myself. I began by collecting bones and feathers and odds and ends I found on walks and now have a freezer of road-kill waiting to be skinned and mounted up – as time and workspace allow!
Over the last couple of years I’ve picked up pieces of old taxidermy – mainly through feeling sorry for the poor things! – this prompted me to begin restoring old mounts and to try and return them to some of their former glory…or in fact with one or two pieces to give them some of the pride they were deprived of in the first place!
I’ve worked on a few pieces now for other people – a juvenile crocodile, a fox, an otter, an osprey…but the piece I’m most proud of is the one I’ve just finished – an eagle for the local secondary school. Here’s what it looked like before:
Now this poor thing had suffered pretty much every form of abuse possible…
- sunlight exposure
- moth damage
- kids had pulled the tail out
- feather loss on back of neck, again caused by people pulling feathers out
- base pulled apart
- rubbish stuck inside the base, inside the wings, and feathers
- paint spattered on feathers
- feet pulled to bits
- no cleaning
- no maintenance…the list goes on.
I apologise for the shoddy quality of the “Before” photographs, they were snapped quickly on my phone. Anyway, what entailed was a thorough cleaning, de-mothing, dusting, stripping the base, rebuilding pretty much everything, re-colouring the feathers, and applying fresh paint to the feet and beak. Needless to say it took a long time.
However, after all the work I am pleased to present an eagle with a bit more dignity:
So there you have it! One eagle.
Wayfaring and Wandering 