Our Thanksgiving weekend held many new adventures, including the rambunctious ice-fishing/sledding in the last blog. The latest shenanigans, however, were purely Tyler's. Tyler made his first squirrel taxidermy attempt last night, which was quite fun to watch. Here is Tyler, matching the eye of the dead squirrel to the glass eye in his hand, ensuring proper size and fit. He had to shave down the mount in order to make it the right size for the squirrel hide. Then, he had to cover the inside of the hid with an antimicrobial to kill anything that would cause it to rot. He ran into a problem, however, when the antimicrobial material caused the hid to shrink by about 50%! It consequently would not fit over the mount (although he tried--the face fit and it looked really cute, because you could give it facial expressions!). Also when he went to turn the hands right-side-out after coating them in the material, they shrunk so fast that the wrists ripped off during the flipping because they shrunk so much the hands wouldn't fit through them! He learned many lessons during this taxidermy attempt, and unfortunately all that is left are these pictures--no squirrel mount! I didn't even save the bones, since I've got too many bone projects going on at work with bird skeletons right now. We even have flesh-eating beatles at work to clean the skeletons for us! So, I get to use them for any skeleton articulation I need to do at work, but I can also bring in any roadkill/taxidermy garbage to have the beatles clean it off for me. Super fun. P.S. I took down the much niftier, but apparently exponentially grosser, picture of a close-up of the skinned little dead squirrel. It was cool. You could see all its little muscles and tendons. But after a few complaints, I thought it best to refrain from a prominent public viewing of said picture.
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