duck, duck, goose

4 duck and 2 geese heads from a hunter.

Skinning the 6 heads didn't take long. Once you cut around the beak and the eyes, you could literally pull of the skin.

I am not sure what role the pelts will play in future projects, but surely I will be thankful I carefully preserved them. They are certainly beautiful and soft.

It only took a few days for the dermestid beetles to do their job. The final step will be to give these bones a day long hydrogen peroxide bath.

tiny things

thousands of little fish were washed up on the shores of the pueblo reservoir. my guess is either it is breeding or stocking season.

unbearable

we didn't have enough room in the freezers for the coyotes, so we stored them outside in garbage bags. a few months passed before we got around to defleshing them for the bugs, so they acquired a great deal of mold and the skin became very tight.

armed with masks, the smell from the rotted flesh was still borderline unbearable. the skin was so tight from dehydration (they originally sat in the colorado sun for many months at a taxidermist farm before we picked them up) that it took 4 hours just to deflesh one.

Box of family memories

I spent over 150 hours on the following Christmas project. It's finally done.

Step 1: Find old VHS family videos. Hook up VCR to recordable DVD player and hit 'play' and 'record'. Repeat 30 times.

Step 2: Transfer Video_TS files to computer. Convert these files to .DV files in Toast Titanium. Import into iMovie. Export movie. Repeat 33 times.

Step 3: It took 10 DVDs to fit 33 movies. I made 8 copies of each DVD, totaling out to 80 DVDs. I'm very happy my computer didn't die.

Step 4: Design and create 7 packages.

Step 5: Drop them off at FedEx.

melting

getting the frozen coyote ready to go into the beetles. if you put the carcass in without thawing it, you run the risk of drowning the beetles when it melts. it is ideal to let it melt in a sealed container to keep other bugs from contaminating the meat. dermisted beetles don't play well with others.

1. a horse head in need of de-fleshing before putting it into the beetles. had been stored in a garbage bag for a couple of weeks before this process.

2. a great deal of flesh was removed from the skull.

3. the most interesting part of the process was removing the brains. here you will see that they had turned to a white paste and were easily scraped out of the brain cavity.

coyote