Hen Party

My local egg connection had the misfortune of losing one of his hens prematurely and he wasted no time letting me know.  One man's trash, as they say...



She was a fancy chicken, curly feathers and all and on the small side so I wonder if maybe she'd had some sort of defect from the start which limited her time with us.



The skin was thin but tough (like a wet swimsuit) and dreamy to work with.  I basically just pulled it off with my bare hands in no time at all; no delicate surgeon cuts necessary. Just another reason I love working with chickens.



 



Almost finished.  I love the messy and curly feathers; the whole thing reminds me of a Jim Henson puppet.







Look at that poof!  I have been dreaming of working with one of these ever since I met them and I am quite pleased with how she turned out so far.







Her feet are drying around balls of clay because I have something very special in mind...

Coho Mojo

My frequent sidekick-in-corpse-fun just got back from a two-day fishing jaunt up in NY and brought me back a beautiful 16lb Coho Salmon form the Great Lakes.  We decided that I'd come over for a BBQ and skin it so I could leave the meat with him, while we dined on dove.  I guess it didn't register with me just how large 16 pounds is; when I saw it sitting in his cooler I laughed and wondered how I was going to negotiate my way around such an impressive specimen.  Honestly, fish are not my forte and the ones I have mounted have been on the small side.







I adore this picture for two reasons, the first being that I'm wearing a shirt with a pig's head on it and the word "gluttony" underneath.  There are so many situations when I feel like just having this shirt on makes everything more funny.  Second, my hand.  In school, my teacher would constantly remark and tease me about my veiny bony hands which I secretly relished.  As a child I spent numerous weekends with my grandmother and my favorite part of her was her hands...I used to pray that someday I would get those same features; the thick, calloused skin and rope-like veins winding their way around the surface, over and under bones like tree roots.  I love my hands because they look as strong as they are and they help me to complete such a wide array of tasks.  They look more like my grandmother's with each passing year and it's one of the many little things that makes getting older so rewarding.



The first cut. Fish skin is pretty fun to work with if you can stomach the smell.  It;s touch and basically impossible to accidentally rip or tear, so you can get as rough as you want.







Apparently it was spawning season and this fish was just LINED with roe!  The Salmon  just stop eating in the last weeks of their lives so their stomachs will shrink to make room for the eggs. That is true dedication to procreation.



We saved the eggs, of course.  For caviar cat food.  Did I say cat food?  I meant, never mind, it's classified.  But that's a LOT of eggs.







 



 



 

This is what it sounds like-

A buddy of mine went dove hunting last week and brought me back a present.  This will be my second attempt at a mourning dove; the first one was a wash, a very humbling experience.  This one was...slightly better.



I can't quite articulate how fond I am of these colors...I want my hair to look like this.







That is actually a wood carving by Jim Childress but it gives a nice example the color and plumage.



Skinning doves is, like I said, a humbling experience.  The dermis is so thin and delicate.  It doesn't seem to withstand any of the gentle pulling and manipulating that I can get away with most other birds.  I wound up with my fair share of holes.  Dove doilies, I guess.



After tanning and fluffing I wound up with a shell worthy of a C+,  a few grades up from the D- my first one amounted to.  It can be really discouraging to see how many feathers get lost while skinning or how many holes I'll have to sew up later, but I really do love the process so much that even the missteps are moments I wouldn't wish to be spared of.



 



Here's the breast meat, marinating in a mixture of simple syrup and lemon juice.  I let it sit for two days. It was a very petite cut of flesh, but well worth fussing over.



I brought it over to a friend's house where a fish skinning event was to take place, and we barbecued the dove.  As you can see it was a hit.  A palette-whetter, if you will.

You stuff pets?

Yesterday I was a guest of the Holmesburg Fish and Game club for their annual outing day.  There was a flea market, a raffle, shooting demos, games, and me, the taxidermist.  It was a bleak rainy morning and the crowd wasn't much of a crowd, however.  I felt daunted at first, as I get pretty shy and self-conscious when I'm not in my environment.  I could hear grumblings from some of the vendors about moving their tables inside and to the correct rooms and the mood just felt...surly.  As I was setting up my table an older guy brushed past me and said, "Looks like we got the apprentice here again"...and I, being a typical American girl socialized to always smile and be friendly and never question other people, just gave him and goofy grin and giggled.  And then I spent the next thirty seconds cursing him in my head, wondering what he meant by that remark and kicking myself for being friendly. Was he saying that based on the quality of my work?  Could he see through me?  I've always dealt with the fear that really I'm just a phony and someday the curtain will come up and everyone will see me for what I truly am.  About a year ago I had a great talk with a dear friend; he's older, far more accomplished  and has racked up a significant amount of life experiences.  I expressed this fear to him and he simply said, "Beth, we're ALL phonies.  We just keep plugging along until it works.  No one should ever be judged for being at the stage of growth which they're at. "  I have held his words close to my heart and they do me well at times like this when I feel intimidated.



My husband Jim thought the guy said that just because I was young (I may be in my thirties but the median age of this group was about 60) and a girl.  I think being a female in this industry cuts both ways.  I like that simply being a member of the fairer sex seems to immediately bring the guard down of just about any thick-skinned, ornery old man and I'd be lying if I claimed to never have batted my eyelashes to get on some guy's good side.  However, I feel like I have to prove myself, as cliché as that sounds.  I wouldn't trade it for the world though.  I love being a girl.







I didn't dress like a mountain woman on purpose, but it certainly helped me fit in with my surroundings.



Did I mention it was the 80th anniversary of the club?  I spoke with one gentleman who was 82; he was the longest living member, having joined in 1945.  Sweet guy.







Did someone say cake?







I put some of my cards on the bulletin board, under the watchful eye of Foxy up there.  I'm enamoured by the idea of a club, the brotherhood and unity of it all.  Guys post photos of their prize catches, they keep up on family info, and support one another when it's needed.  So many of them are vets, and seeing the way our country as a whole treats its veterans (like crap) it's good to see a group of them laughing, happy and healthy in a place where they can feel safe.







As the day went on things got better.  I chatted up a bunch of hunters, gave out many cards and could possibly have some leads. There were some great hunting stories, too, about 800 pound bears ("and that was AFTER it was field-dressed!"), bobcats, coyotes being mistaken for German Shepards, and so forth.







The day's menu:  I think it's a riot that people still say "freedom fries".







Priceless, in fact.



The real action began when the rifle team arrived with some heavy artillery. To the left is a 1919 Browning Machine gun and on the right is a Gatling Gun.







The Gatling in action.  There were tracer bullets in the magazine, every 35 rounds. They appeared as red flares flying out of the gun.  I couldn't believe how fast that thing shot, just from a simple hand crank.







While that one was loud and very impressive, the Browning was like an earthquake.  Of course I forgot my "ears" so I just plugged my fingers in my head.  I still felt every part of my body vibrating though, including my eyebrows.  It was insane.







The range just got more and more smokey as the shooting continued and the smell of burning stuck in my nose for most of the day.







It was a real treat to see, and just about every one of us was in awe.  I left with a Holmesburg tee shirt and a positive outlook on the day.

Tastes like Chicken!

It appears to be squirrel season over here; I just skinned three last week and was gifted one more today.  Two of the three from last week were harvested by a friend and presented to me with the understanding that I would skin them and bring the meat to a BBQ in the near future.  I'm quite enthused about the sudden influx of small mammal specimen, seeing as I've got several deadlines looming nearby and I adore working with little furry creatures.



Here are the two which my friend caught.   I was impressed by what a good shot he is:  The first one got it right in the neck...







While the second took a shot right in the head.







I kept the bullet.  Or pellet, or whatever it's called.







This may seem cruel but the point is these creatures died instantly and that, to me, is humane.  The last thing it knew was scampering around happily and then-nothing.  I'll take nourishment from this kind of meat source over a mutated chicken with breast meat so abnormally large and cumbersome that it can't even walk five steps in its dark shitty pen, any day.



I marinated the meat in a mixture of Yuengling Lager, soy sauce and honey for 48 hours.  We threw it on the grill and let it cook for about twenty minutes.







The squirrel, plated.







I snatched a bit of the back-strap (most delicious cut of meat from deer, rabbits and squirrel) while it was being plated and bit into it, uncertain of what I'd taste.  It certainly smelled delicious, but this was a city squirrel.  It lived off of local compost so I guess you could say he ate well but...I was still wary.



The first taste washed all doubt away however, as salty sweet sizzling juiciness exploded in my mouth.  The mouth feel was tender and crisp.  Cries of "tastes like chicken!" could be heard from the kitchen as everyone took turns trying the new dish. Success!  I felt validated, I felt like I'd done something right.



I realise that to many people, eating squirrel is nothing new and such ado over this dish could read as discrediting a humble, naturally natural way of life or trying to make it a novelty.  I just want to express that to myself and my friends this was a completely new experience and a rewarding one at that.  I admire and aspire live the aforementioned way of life, where its just a day's work to harvest an animal and live off the land.

Only four months until Christmas!

Operation gosling-tree-topper is in full swing and on I'm just about on the home stretch with this project.



Dried and fluffed: that skin had to be one of the softest things I've ever felt.  Part of me wished it was mine to use as I wished; I would've fashioned a pair of earmuffs out of it.







While drying the skin I was presented with a new fronteir: molting.  I had been completely unaware that birds went through this process until my friend Bailey the Hen-Master enlightened me to this phenomenon.  While skinning the goose I'd noticed some skin peeling off his legs, not unlike a snake, but thought nothing of it.  But when the downy feathers around his neck began falling out en masse while drying, I started to panic. I looked up "goose molting" online and found out that young geese molt for the first time at 8-10 weeks, at which point their flight feathers come in. ( I also learned that geese are one fo the few monogamous species occurring in nature and mate for life.)  Molting occurs annually and is a family experience.  They try and stay close to the water at this time as an escape plan from predators, since they can't fly.  Reading this, I was reminded of a night, weeks ago, when two friends and I were cutting through a field out in the suburbs to walk to another friend's house.  There were geese everywhere and it looked like  we'd just missed a giant pillow fight.  Now I understand why.  It's molting season, and Bobby the goose must have been just entering his first molt when he passed.



I managed to handle the skin very carefully and keep the loss to a minimum.



This was not an easy mount by any means; the skin was extremely delicate and I had to handle it with surgical precision to keep  from losing any more feathers. The underformed wings presented a challenge as well, being completely new territory to me.  Needless to say, once I had him sewn up and carded, my sigh of relief could be heard from blocks away, I'm sure.











I've still got more to do, but I'm over the hump and quite pleased about it.

What are you, trying to be humane?

That is a very tiny picture of me shooting a firearm for my first time.  Another phase in the progression of me becoming a hunter, in small increments.



My friend Larry at The Firing Line in South Philadelphia was gracious enough to host myself and some friends the other evening for a shooting lesson. Some of us had handled guns before, some (me) had not.  I think I did OK for my first time; it's much more difficult that I'd imagined.  So many things to think about at once-I felt somewhat overwhelmed.    I'm comforted by recalling how intimidated I was by driving a car a first though, with that same inundated-with-information feeling, and years later I am one of the best drivers I know.  These things just take time.



That said, I think I did OK.  We shot with a very simple handgun first; at least I hit the target.  Then we moved onto a rifle, which I liked because the long barrel made aiming easier.  It was also very unthreatening: quiet, no recoil, and a simple single bullet load.  Plus it felt very marching bandy.  We then moved onto revolvers, which was like throwing fire right out of my hands.  A little more intense than I'd prefer but one had laser sights which made hitting the target a snap.  I was trying not to "kill" my cartoon robber-guy, so I shot his shoulder and hand.  I thought this was very thoughtful, but all I got was a couple chuckles from the peanut gallery.







While our group of noobs was in our little stall with Larry, there were guys coming and going, getting some shooting in after work-a sort of happy hour, I suppose.  I was initially shocked at how loud the shots were.  It took an hour or so to shake off the unnerving feeling of being surrounded by so much potential killing power.  I mean, maybe this is just because I'm so new to this but it felt like walking into that place was the ultimate excercise in trust of the sanity of strangers.  What if one of those guys just snapped and aimed his gun at someone else?  What if one of us just ran out into the range?  This wouldn't be the first time I've had morbid thoughts like this...sometimes I'm just astounded by the fact that society works.  People just...behave.  Driving on a highway, anyone could lose it and start a fifty car pile-up.  But we all keep the wheel straight and go with the flow.  And we trust that everyone else will do the same.  When I was a child in class, I used to fantasize about what would happen if someone jumped out of their desk and ran up to the teacher and punched him.  Or screamed an obscenity at the top of their lungs.  Or jumped out the window.  Perhaps I've got a touch of insanity bubbling just beneath the surface and I understand that I have to follow the rules to exist in this world, perhaps I was bored and yearning for something to break the monotony of my days.  Or maybe we're all like this and have that ingrained sense of carnal, unpredictable self buried in our psyche but the knowledge that we all are connected and what's trouble for one is trouble for all.



And then there's always the few poor SOBs that actually do snap.  Not me though: I love my life, I love my people, and I love the world too much.



So shooting.  I enjoyed it.  I want to do it again.  But what I really need to focus on is practicing my bow.  That's the next step. Soon enough...