First Waterfowl Mount

I've had an interest in taxidermy since I was a kid. I've tinkered with some skull mounts and hide tanning here and there, but I've never actually done a taxidermy mount of a whole animal. Until now.

A couple years ago I was able to attend a one-day waterfowl taxidermy seminar where I watched a professional taxidermist mount a teal from start to finish. There are quite a few steps involved in the process, and I got some valuable experience and learned some helpful tips from watching the taxidermist at the seminar. So I decided I wanted to give this a try for myself.

One of the tools I saw the taxidermist use was a bird flesher, which he had built himself using a low horsepower motor and a wire wheel, to remove all the fat and grease from the bird skin prior to mounting. I decided to build my own bird flesher a few weeks ago after seeing a few different designs on the internet. Here is my homemade bird flesher:

I used a clear rubbermaid container to serve as the containment area to catch all of the fat from the bird when it is removed from the skin by the wire wheel. An attic fan motor powers the wheel and is wired to an on/off switch.

The first duck I chose to mount is a nice American Wigeon drake that I shot during last year's duck season. I should have taken more pictures of the entire process, but unfortunately I didn't, so here is one I took of the skin while I was sewing up some of the holes in the bird in preparation for putting the skin on the mannikin. As you can tell it doesn't look like much at this point...

And here is the final product. I'm happy with the way it turned out for my first one. There are some things I will do differently on the next one as I hope to improve on my second mount. It was a fun project but some very tedious work.

Different Technique Using a Game Camera

The main reason I use game cameras is to capture pictures of deer. But lately I've wanted to try a different setup with one of my cameras. I wanted to try to get some pictures of ducks on a pond. So a couple weeks ago I positioned a camera at the water's edge at my favorite duck hunting spot to see what kind of pictures I could get. I got a memory card full of duck pictures (383 to be exact). I was pleased with the images, but I didn't take into account the direction of the sun and the lighting wasn't the best for quality pictures. Next time I will position the camera where the sun will be behind the camera to better capture the colors of the birds' plumage. Anyway, here are some of my favorites from this batch of pictures.

Duck Jerky - A Culinary Experiment

I'll be honest. I'm not a big fan of duck meat. I like it as stew meat when it is cut up into small, bite-size portions, but cooking the entire duck or even the breast as a whole doesn't have much appeal to me. (I'm not saying it is bad, I'm just saying it isn't my favorite.)

I kept thinking of different ways I could cook the duck meat from my last hunt so that it might be a little tastier and not quite as gamey. One of my coworkers suggested that I make jerky out of it. I've never made jerky before, and that sounded pretty good to me, so I decided to give it a try.

The duck meat I was using had been cut off the breast into filets before it was placed in the freezer. So the first thing I did was thaw the meat out and I sliced it longways into thin strips. (Like you would butterfly a steak, except thinner.) I tried to cut the strips as thin as I could by hand, and I would guess they were about an 1/8" thick.

Next I mixed up a marinade. I searched on the internet and found a few different recipes, and all of them had the same basic ingredients. Here is what I used:
- soy sauce
- worcestershire sauce
- tabasco sauce
- garlic powder
- onion powder
- black pepper
- crushed red pepper
- mesquite flavored seasoning
- meat tenderizer
- brown sugar

I placed all of the meat in a ziplock bag and poured in the marinade. I made sure all the meat was completely covered and then I sealed the bag. I then placed it in the regrigerator to allow the meat to marinate for about 24 hours.

After reading up on the different ways to make jerky, I decided I would start mine off in the smoker for an hour or two, and then allow it to finish drying in the oven. So, the next evening I got a fire going in the fire box with some mesquite wood.

I placed the thin strips of marinated duck meat on the top rack in the smoker and then closed the lid.

My smoker has a thermometer built into it, and I tried to keep the temperature between 150 and 175. This was by far the most challenging part of the process because keeping the fire burning steadily at the same intensity is almost impossible to do. I did a pretty good job keeping the temperature in the range I wanted it, but occasionally it would creep up into the 175 - 200 range. I stayed with it and checked the fire often for about two hours.

Toward the end of that two hours it was about time for me to help get my daughters to sleep, so I wasn't able to tend the fire quite like I should have, and I noticed the meat was starting to look like it was about done. I taste-tested it and it seemed like it was about ready, so I decided not to use the oven and I left it on the smoker for about another half hour.

The end product didn't quite turn out as I had hoped, but for my first try it will do. The flavor was actually really good, but a few of the pieces got a little bit crispy. It was also just a tad spicier than what I would prefer, but it is still edible. Some of my friends at work asked to try some of it, and a couple of them even asked for another piece. (I don't know if they really liked it, if they were really hungry, or if they were just being polite.)

Some lessons learned from this first batch:
- Make the strips just a little bit thicker to keep them from getting crispy.
- Use less tabasco sauce.
- Keep the temperature at a more constant level.

In my opinion, this is a really good alternative for cooking duck meat. There was no gamey taste at all, and it really was pretty tasty. It would make a great snack to take in your backpack when you go out into the woods to hunt or for a day of fishing. I will definitely have to make some more!

Cold Morning Duck Hunt

I've been so focused on deer hunting for the last few months that I haven't spent much time duck hunting. This past week I planned to change that trend, and I invited a couple of my friends from work to come out and duck hunt with me at our lease. I had high hopes for our hunt because I have been seeing lots of ducks on the ponds this year, but with the recent Arctic air that moved into our area I wasn't sure if any of the birds would still be there. I figured they had either packed up and headed South or there would be more birds that had moved in from the North.

Just before we arrived at our hunting spot early Saturday morning the thermometer on my truck was reading 1 degree. There was no wind at all so I knew the pond would probably be completely frozen over and we would have to break ice to put the decoys out. And that we did. We busted ice, threw out a few decoys, and waited for legal shooting hours to arrive, which is 30 minutes before sunrise.

Once the clock ticked over to 7:08 and we could legally begin to shoot, the ducks began piling in. It was one of the best duck hunts I have ever been a part of, and by 8:00 the four of us had limited out! Here is a picture of the crew. From left to right: David Mackintosh, Justin Berndt, Lee Flannery, and myself.


This was quite a mixed bag of ducks with most of them being Widgeons and Gadwalls. We also saw some Pintails and a Redhead drake but we couldn't get a shot because they were too far out and wouldn't commit. There were also some Mallards that came in, and Lee shot the trophy bird of the morning by bagging his first Mallard drake.

It was an awesome time with some good friends! I can't think of a much better place to watch the sun come up and enjoy the immaculate handiwork of our Creator!

Here are a few more images from the weekend. Thanks to my friend Justin for the picture in my new blog header.