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Lets talk about it. Maggots.
13 years ago
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Ok, So a friend of mine gave me a set of turkey wings he didn't really want, and I wanted the feathers.
Now I had assumed just from working in petstores and having to clip parakeet's wings on a regular basis, that feathers could just be pulled out. (Not that I've ever plucked any feathers, just that a lot of times they'll loose a lot of tail feathers in the process of catching, holding them, and clipping the wings.
Let me tell you. Plucking anything besides body feathers, is no simple task.
Here's a diagram:
http://ars.els-cdn.com/content/imag.....00051-gr10.jpg
Flight feathers are actually connected directly to the bone, the primaries are actually REALLY stuck in there.
Now what I really didn't know, and I ended up looking this up after I decided to take on this task, is that is you want to get feathers from wings, you actually have to do a fair amount of disection.
If you want to play surgeon (which is actually great practice if you ever wish to do taxidermy or even flesh most of your bones by hand) this topic is VERY helpful, and even has pictures! :
How to remove feathers with Quills in tact - http://www.primitivearcher.com/smf/.....?topic=12542.0
Now as you see in these pictures, and as you may know from eating/cooking chicken, birds have very delicate skins and not a lot of wing meat. I kinda fell on this technique by accident, but it's actually a preferred method when it comes to obtaining feathers from wings.
This is a VERY quick, easy, but somewhat gross (if you're squeamish) technique that works VERY well with birds. Now I've only got the wings going, but I can't imagine a full sized animal taking much longer.
All I really did was leave the wings in a shopping bag (actually I had the wings double bagged) I had them hanging on the porch. One day it rained, the next day when I wen't to dry them out and just preserve them I found there to be a bag of nothing but bones, feathers maggots and a very small amount of meat
(more a slew than actual tissue)
I decided to just put that bag in a bucket, put a screen lid on that, and set it in the bushes in the back of my yard. I checked it today, and it's pretty much just bones and feathers. To my biggest surprise they really didn't smell that bad. I'm not saying it smelt good or even neutral... just it didn't smell like a bag of rot and maggots, just like regular dead smell.
Next time I come across a dead bird I'm going to try this out again and I'll be sure to document it, since bird's fragile bones are very had to keep in tact since scavengers often steal bodies. Maggots may make a lot of people's stomachs turn, but they are very effective little cleaners, I'm on day 3 with them and I think within another day I'll be ready to clean off the feathers and bones and set them in borax and peroxide. (borax to disinfect the bones, and peroxide for the bones)
Now I had assumed just from working in petstores and having to clip parakeet's wings on a regular basis, that feathers could just be pulled out. (Not that I've ever plucked any feathers, just that a lot of times they'll loose a lot of tail feathers in the process of catching, holding them, and clipping the wings.
Let me tell you. Plucking anything besides body feathers, is no simple task.
Here's a diagram:
http://ars.els-cdn.com/content/imag.....00051-gr10.jpg
Flight feathers are actually connected directly to the bone, the primaries are actually REALLY stuck in there.
Now what I really didn't know, and I ended up looking this up after I decided to take on this task, is that is you want to get feathers from wings, you actually have to do a fair amount of disection.
If you want to play surgeon (which is actually great practice if you ever wish to do taxidermy or even flesh most of your bones by hand) this topic is VERY helpful, and even has pictures! :
How to remove feathers with Quills in tact - http://www.primitivearcher.com/smf/.....?topic=12542.0
Now as you see in these pictures, and as you may know from eating/cooking chicken, birds have very delicate skins and not a lot of wing meat. I kinda fell on this technique by accident, but it's actually a preferred method when it comes to obtaining feathers from wings.
This is a VERY quick, easy, but somewhat gross (if you're squeamish) technique that works VERY well with birds. Now I've only got the wings going, but I can't imagine a full sized animal taking much longer.
All I really did was leave the wings in a shopping bag (actually I had the wings double bagged) I had them hanging on the porch. One day it rained, the next day when I wen't to dry them out and just preserve them I found there to be a bag of nothing but bones, feathers maggots and a very small amount of meat
(more a slew than actual tissue)
I decided to just put that bag in a bucket, put a screen lid on that, and set it in the bushes in the back of my yard. I checked it today, and it's pretty much just bones and feathers. To my biggest surprise they really didn't smell that bad. I'm not saying it smelt good or even neutral... just it didn't smell like a bag of rot and maggots, just like regular dead smell.
Next time I come across a dead bird I'm going to try this out again and I'll be sure to document it, since bird's fragile bones are very had to keep in tact since scavengers often steal bodies. Maggots may make a lot of people's stomachs turn, but they are very effective little cleaners, I'm on day 3 with them and I think within another day I'll be ready to clean off the feathers and bones and set them in borax and peroxide. (borax to disinfect the bones, and peroxide for the bones)
I really need to start taking pictures when I work on stuff, but I hate taking gloves on and off :/
Have you tried soaking it in hot, but not boiling, water for a few days? That will also help pull out a lot of the grease too. That stuff around the antler base it always tough to get off. It's the same way with goats and rams. =\A deer skull or even any mammal bigger than a rat would take at least 2 or 3 generations of maggots
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNAxrpzc6ws
You can get your feathers faster and without the horrid stank. I get the vast majority of feathers from vultures since A: They're common and B: I can collect them without much trouble next to larger roadkills.
Vulture are pretty foul when they're alive. It makes working with them when they're dead pretty bad if not impossible for me. No mask in the world covers up that stink and once they reach a certain level of smelliness I just can't work with them. Salting them cuts the smell down considerably.
Maggots are great for larger critters that you have no intention of revisiting until they're picked dry, But for something you're going to go back to and work on again so soon? I know some folks have pretty dead senses of smell but I unfortunately do not have that. Hell I can't even stand walking past smelly people at stores. In fact I had to make a rule to stop picking up dead things until the heatwave broke because I kept pulling over to grab them only to get so close and start gagging. I have a strong stomach. I've smelled dead and rotting and the people of Wal-mart. Nothing can compare to three day old raccoon in 98/100 degree all day Indiana heat. As I can only assume nothing can compare to double bagged wet rotting bird wings.
I wouldn't recommend going this route with anything besides birds, and NO this is NOT a good idea to do in your back yard in the summer, haha! It's already pretty cool here so that sort of helps keep smells down.
You don't need to contain them so much as just make sure the fleshy parts are at lest covered. I tack mine to a large board and cover them in my salt solution for a few days then turn them over and repeat.
This trick don't work so great on mammal paws thought. Too much meat. But I can still get lots of use out of claws and finger bones. If I could just get all the damn tendons off >:I