curiosity

bueller doesn't curb his curiosity to anything; even when it comes the remnants of his own species.

keeping warm

a spider at work crawls inside to keep warm.

being ernest

we befriended a taxidermist in southern colorado named ernest wilkinson ( his book is HERE ). he took us on a tour of his bone yard.

after peeling off the hides, ernest left a pile of coyotes in his yard. like kids in a candy store, we took as many as we could.

freelance life

I wrote a couple of paragraphs about my freelance life so I could get a free Freelancers Union notebook!

Read the article here:Freelancers Union Article

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.