General Principles Involved in Skinning Large Birds.—In skinning a large bird you must have room according to your strength and the size of your subject. You will need the usual materials in quantity, plenty of table space, and a stout hook depending from the ceiling at the end of a stout cord, to hang your half-skinned victim upon at a certain stage of the proceedings.

With but few exceptions, the process in skinning a large bird is, from start to finish, precisely similar in principle to that for a small one, which has already been described. When you get the body about half skinned, and are well started up the back, thrust your hanging hook into the top of the pelvis, and suspend the bird in mid-air, so that you can work with both hands. Be careful, however, throughout the whole operation that you do not allow the weight of the body of the skin to stretch the skin of the neck.

If the head is small enough that the skin of the neck will pass over it, skin right over it to the base of the beak itself, and proceed in every respect as with small birds. If, however, the skin of the neck will not go over the head, then skin the neck as far toward the head as you possibly can (usually in such cases you can go no farther than the lower end of the axis or second cervical vertebra), and then cut it off.

The next step is to skin the head. Turn the skin right side out, make a clean, straight cut from the top of the head straight down the back of the neck for a sufficient distance to allow the remaining cervical vertebrÆ to be drawn up through the opening. It is now a very simple matter to skin the head and clean the skull.

The wing of a large bird contains, between the elbow and the so-called "shoulder-joint" (carpus), quite a quantity of flesh lying underneath and between the radius and ulna. Whatever you do with the wing, never cut the ends of the secondaries loose from the ulna. In spacing and adjusting those secondaries nature has done something which, to save your life, you cannot do as well, and if you meddle with her work some one will be sorry. Slit open the skin all along the under side of this long joint of the wing, cut out all the flesh from around the radius and ulna, and poison the interior thoroughly. Put in a little filling of tow or cotton, and sew up the opening. Even in small birds, except the smallest ones, it is an excellent plan to slit open the wing on the under side and put some dry poison on the flesh, without stopping to sew up the cut. Clean out the flesh and the oil sac from the root of the tail, and poison that part so thoroughly that any insect who ever dares to think once of harboring there will instantly drop dead.

A bird like a large heron, with long legs, or an eagle with very thick legs, should always have the tendons removed from the legs in order to facilitate curing, and for the mutual benefit of both specimen and taxidermist when, a little later, the two meet in the laboratory and engage in a hand-to-hand struggle for supremacy. To accomplish this, cut a slit lengthwise in the ball of the foot where its rests upon the ground. Cut off the tendons where they branch and attach to the toes, seize the end of each large tendon with your pliers and pull it forcibly out of the leg. You can do this with a fresh bird in about five minutes, whereas in a dry skin that has been relaxed it will take you much longer. This removes a fine subject for decomposition, and also leaves the space necessary for the leg wire when the specimen is mounted. After having removed the tendon I always give the legs a coat of rather thin arsenical soap, both to cure them and protect them from insects. Another excellent plan is to lay all such long legs in a pan of salt-and-alum bath solution for a few hours to thoroughly cure them.

If there is a layer of fat adhering to the skin, it must be scraped off and absorbed with corn meal, and scraped again until it is all off. A layer of fat spoils a skin more quickly and more effectually than any novice can be expected to believe until he sees for himself, in some of his finest ducks and brants, just how it is done. If a skin is worth saving at all, it is worth preserving properly. Grease left on a skin "burns" it.

In making up a skin having a long, slender neck like that of swan, goose, heron, or crane, it is an excellent plan (when possible) to take a stout wire, as long as the entire neck and body, wrap a little tow or cotton rags around it to partly form a false neck, and insert it in the skin. This will often save a neck from being completely broken in two. Fill the body of the skin with excelsior, tow, cotton, or crumpled paper, which, in distant jungles, far from civilization, is an excellent thing. In case of need, you may fill with dry leaves, dead grass, in fact almost anything except wool, hair, or other animal products. Do not fill the body out to more than two-thirds its natural size, unless you have abundant storage-room, and transportation facilities. If filled out full size, large bird skins fill up boxes and drawers wonderfully fast, and generally it is best to flatten such skins a little.

Large bird skins should always be sewn up. The head must be properly filled out, and if cut open at the back, that also should have a few stitches, but not too many, for obvious reasons. In laying out a large skin, if the neck be long, bend it around to one side as the specimen lies before you on its back, and lay it on the side of the body along the edge of the wing. If the legs are long, they, too, must be bent up so that the feet lie upon the body. The accompanying figure, from a specimen prepared by Mr. William Palmer, shows just how a great blue heron should be done. The wings must be carefully placed, the plumage dressed and nicely adjusted, and the finished skin pinned up in a wide strip of thin cotton-cloth, or anything else you please, to keep it in perfect shape until it dries.

Of course, a large skin requires plenty of air while it is drying, and several days' time besides. If such specimens are packed and shipped before they are dry, mould and destruction will be their portion, and the collector will do well to flee from the wrath to come. In shipping bird skins in the East Indies and similar climates, it is customary to solder them up, air tight, in tin-lined boxes. Dr. W.J. Holland advises me, however, that dry wooden boxes are good enough if they are tight, and are first painted over on the inside with melted crystals of carbolic acid.

Special and Exceptional Cases.—Having fully considered the various principles involved in making ordinary bird skins, it is now necessary to note the exceptional cases, and state how each is to be disposed of. It is my desire to equip the beginner, as far as possible, against every emergency that is likely to arise in ornithological collecting. For convenience we will take a few of the avian orders, in their natural sequence, beginning with the lowest.

The Struthiones: Ostriches, Emus, and Cassowaries.—These great birds are prime favorites with the showmen, and many a fine specimen often falls most unexpectedly into the hands of an astonished "local taxidermist," to the ultimate enrichment of some museum. Happy is he to whom falls a beautiful, glossy, brown-black cassowary, with head and neck of rich purple, and red and yellow, and what-not—truly a wonderful bird, and not too large. A full grown African ostrich is an avian colossus, and his enormous size makes him quite a serious matter.

With these great birds it is best to open the skin of each leg from the lower end of the tibia all the way down to the foot, in order to entirely remove the tendons. Detach the skin from the bone all the way round, and cure it with arsenical soap and a little alum. The leg should be cut open on the inside, well back, where the seam will be most out of sight. After having removed a skin, you will need to keep it soft, sometimes for several days, perhaps until you can make a suitable manikin, if it is a large ostrich. Cure the skin with arsenical soap and salt (protecting the feathers carefully meanwhile), and keep it wrapped up and away from the air until you are ready to put it on the manikin for the last time; then treat it with dry alum to make it dry and harden properly.

Order Sphenisci: The Penguins.—The penguin of the Antarctic seas is the king of fat birds, but such magnificent monsters as those brought home by the Challenger, and now in the British Museum, are worth a long trip to secure. Mr. Frederick Pearcy, who collected and preserved the specimens, assured me that it required two men to carry one, and that the removal of the grease from the skins was a dreadful task. Of the largest specimens, the huge legs and feet were cut off at the lower end of the tibiÆ, and preserved in alcohol until they could be skinned and cleaned. Since it is probable that only a very few of my readers will ever visit the rainy, foggy, storm-beaten and God-forsaken land of the penguin, I will leave the question of grease removal to the paragraph relating to the Lamellirostres.

Longipennes: The Gulls, Albatrosses, etc.—The gulls, terns, and petrels are so beautiful in flight that they are often mounted with the wings fully spread, in flying attitudes. When a bird is to be mounted thus, the large wing-bones must not be broken, but simply disjointed and cut loose from the body at the shoulders. When it is possible to do so, an albatross should be mounted with wings, outspread, to reveal to the student their enormous length, and the disproportionate shortness of the primaries and secondaries. If all the albatrosses in a museum collection are mounted with closed wings, as they nearly always are, the average observer gains not the faintest conception of the form and size of the bird in motion—its normal condition.

Steganopodes: The Pelicans.—The great white pelican is one of the most satisfactory and even agreeable birds to mount that could possibly fall into the hands of an able-bodied taxidermist. If I ever adopt a shield and an assortment of devices with which to cover it, one of the latter shall be a figure of a huge white pelican rampant; for it was a bird of that species that gave me a start in taxidermy. It happened in this wise:

The year before I penetrated the walls of my Alma Mater, its venerable president sought to find among the students an (alleged) taxidermist, or at least the promise of one. He publicly offered the princely sum of $10 to any one who could come forward and mount a bird decently. The gauntlet thus recklessly thrown down no one could pick up that year, and by the year following, when I appeared upon the scene, it had grown cold. Like another Lochinvar, I "came late" for that offer. I had seen one bird skinned and mounted, and I knew I could do one like it. That was an old, rusty, second-hand crow. I petitioned to have a chance to "stuff birds," but it fell on deaf ears. I even went so far as to mount a squirrel, to show what I could do, and although it was a very fair specimen for that benighted period, it failed to win.

But one day some good genius sent a dead bird to the president, for the museum, and with it heaven sent my opportunity. Professor Bessey sent for me and said, "Now, young man, we are going to see how much you know about stuffing birds. We've got a specimen for you to try your hand on, and if you succeed in mounting it decently, you may possibly get an opportunity to work in the museum." I replied, "Show me the victim."

He took me to his room, and there, spread out upon the carpet, lay an enormous white pelican. His body was like a great downy pillow, his bill was as long as a fence-rail, with a great horny knot atop of it, and his huge yellow pouch would have held a whole school of mackerel, teachers and all. And what wings! They were full-grown angel's size, and as white and spotless as Gabriel's own. It seemed like sacrilege to touch them. And such feet! Enough of them would have covered the college campus. I had never before seen such a bird, even in my dreams. He really was larger than the maximum measurements given by Audubon for that species. Professor Bessey informed me that his name was Pelicanus erythrorhynchos. It was not quite so long as his bill, nor so rough, but it was pretty nearly.

With a pocket-knife, an old misfit pair of pliers, and a smooth, flat piece of steel that had once been a file, I skinned and mounted that bird, "in the highest style of the art," as the taxidermic business card always hath it. I have also faint recollections of a great wad of oakum made into a body, a thimbleful of arsenic, and a pair of eyes—merely this and nothing more. As I hope to live, I believe I could feed a live pelican as much arsenic as I put upon that great skin without even giving him the stomach-ache; but the bugs seemed to know that was my first effort, and they have never touched him. I mounted him as the Irishman played the fiddle at Donnybrook fair, neither by note nor by ear, but, "be jabers, by main strength," and posed and shaped him by Audubon's superb plate. He was pronounced an unqualified success. I shaped his future, and he shaped mine at the same time. When I saw him again, seven years later, he was every bit as good as new, and I was astonished to find how really good he was. He was the first bird I ever skinned or mounted, and a lucky bird he was for me. Had he been a dirty, greasy, old swan, think what a scrape I should have been in!

Lamellirostres: The Ducks, Geese, Swans (and Flamingoes).—There are but two points to be spoken of under this head. The first is that all the birds of this order must have their heads skinned through a slit at the back of the head. The other is in regard to cleaning.

All ducks, geese, and swans are very fat, even when they are poorest. Were they otherwise, they could not live on the water as they do. Nearly the whole body is enveloped in a firm, tenacious layer of fat, into which the ends of the body feathers run and take root, and bind the skin itself down so firmly that it really becomes a part of the fatty layer. To remove the skin, you must have a keen knife, and by hard labor slice through the fat as you go. As a general thing, it is slow and tedious work. When you begin, and all the way as you proceed, use plenty of plaster Paris or cornmeal to absorb the free oil, and keep it off the feathers.

After the skin is off the body, and before you turn it right side out, scrape the inside to get the oil off, absorb it with your absorbent material, and scrape it again and again until the grease is practically all off, and you have only the skin remaining. This takes work. There is no royal road to making good duck skins. If you think you can get along all right by overwhelming the grease on the skin with arsenic and alum, and venture to leave it half cleaned, you will pay the penalty later, and it will serve you right. You cannot cure grease with preservatives. You may fill a fat duck skin half full of arsenic, and yet the oil will ooze out through the skin on the other side, turning the feathers a dirty yellow color. The dermestes can eat every feather, and also the skin itself, from the outside, without getting a morsel of the arsenic. The fat simply acts as an impervious wall between the poison and the skin. Clean a duck skin thoroughly or else throw it away. It used to be a common thing to see duck skins with the breast feathers a solid mass of nasty yellow grease from the oil that had run out from the opening cut, but such specimens are becoming rare now.

If the feathers get soiled with grease, blood and dirt, wash the plumage with clean turpentine and a soft tooth-brush, apply an abundance of plaster Paris, rub it into the feathers, and immediately beat it out with a supple switch, or piece of stiff wire of proper size. If you have not these materials, wash the feathers with warm water and a little soap, and dry as best you can, according to what you have. Manipulate the feathers while they are drying and they will come out soft and fluffy as in life; but if left to dry without this, they will remain in a bedraggled, soaked, and stringy condition. This subject will be fully considered in a separate chapter (XXV.).

In making up the skin of a duck or goose, a piece of wire must be put into the neck, with the tow or other filling wrapped around it, or failing that, the neck filling must be wrapped around a small stick, the upper end of which is to be thrust forcibly into the skull. The head is large and heavy, and the neck is very small, so small that the skin will break in two if there is not a wire or stick run through the body and neck into the head to support the latter when the skin is being handled. The feet of all web-footed birds should be spread while drying.

Alectorides: The Cranes and Herodiones.—There is but little to add in regard to birds of either of these orders. The cranes require a slit in the skin at the back of the head, but the herons do not. The necks of the latter are very often filled too full in making up a skin, and the neck filling is often made round, whereas it should always be flat, like the actual neck of the heron or bittern. It is not necessary to remove the tendons from the legs of the small herons, ibises, etc., but the legs should always be bent up and the feet disposed of on the body. The feet and legs of all the above must be treated to a coat of thin arsenical soap, for the benefit of insect pests.