Bird Bodys

[10inchbeard]

Hello,  I am going to try my first duck soon and was wondering if most people tie there own bodies on buy a form?  Also i  have two videos that wrap there own bodies and us wood wool.  I this the best substance to use?  Can u use polyfil or pillow stuffing?  Thanks for the advise!!!!

[AOTaxi]

I tie a few but buy most bodies, and polyfill is not dense enough IMO, you would have to use two bags to tie a body dense enogh to hold a wire tie-in.
AO

[mark11]

i wrap or carve almost all of my own bodies including turkey and yes woodwool is the best medium for this, the only time i use fiberfill in wrapping is right at the end when i need to fix a small area or need to make a body smoother but it would never hold a wire tight enough by itself. wrapping is a great skill to build but there are a lot of passable commercial bodies on the market just make sure that if you are going to buy one that you take good measurements and even keep the real carcass to compare the form to once you get it, just because the catalog says it is a whatever body doesn't mean it is automatically the right fit for what you have, or necessarilly even the right shape. markw.

[SteveP]

I wrap most of my bodies up to duck and pheasant sizes, but find it takes a lot of wood wool to do geese or larger. I once ordered a snow goose body for an immature lesser for competition. By the time I got done cutting out slices, bondo-ing back together, and filing and sanding, I could have wrapped three very nice bodies. The catalog didn't specify greater or lesser, I just assumed a midwest supplier would automatically default to "lesser". I guess I learned. If you plan to go with supplier forms, keep many different sizes of similar birds on hand. You'll have a much better chance of being able to use the right size form without delays.

[igor]

There is one more method to make birds is wire frame. This way you can use pillow stuffing.
Also you can carve a body from a block of foam.

[Nancy C]

Some (or most) of the suppliers provide measurements with their bird forms now but it seems to me like this is a relatively new idea. Regardless, I approve 100% and always try to support those suppliers who at least give us bird taxidermists a fighting chance.

Now ... if only they would do the same with their cast heads.
Something as simple as a culmen measurement would be a great start.

[CLewis]

Knowing how to tie and use a wrapped body is a great asset to any bird taxidermist.  There are times when this method is the best.  However, most of the time one can find a very adequate foam body that has been cast to the correct measurements from one of the established suppliers.  There are quite a few to choose from.  No two are exactly the same in appearance or measurement.  Certainly you can not purchase them all, but on average you can find perfectly acceptable ones that take only a little modification.  Just remember that when taking measurements on a skinned carcass, you may have removed a layer of fat that can easily make the measurement 1/2 inch off in circumstance and if you remove the tail bone another 1/2/inch (depending on the bird) off in length.  On a fat goose, the amount can be materially bigger.

If you do a lot of one kind, you could also cast your own.  It is not too difficult to do and will give you yet another option.  You will soon find out that no two birds of the same specie have exactly the same body size, so some modification will still be necessary to match the carcass.

I agree totally with Nancy about providing measurements for artificial heads.  I would love to see bill length mentioned on both mallard heads and especially Canada goose heads.  There are a lot more sizes than small, medium and large.

[redbluffcustoms]

50/50,

[cast_n_blast]

When I first started I would buy my bodies, but it would take me more time to sand and reshape the foam body to fit than it takes my to wrap a body now.  I also had a guy tell me that with the wood wool, that if you have a little bit of greese left on the skin the wood wool will probably soak it up.  My opion I would go with wraping your own

[10inchbeard]

Thanks for the feedback everyone. 

[hawkijon]

Hey i'm new to the wood wool bodies and would like to try it, sounds like though its is old fashioned its a quick cheap way than waiting on ups or a mold to set. im familiar with wood wool, and how you wet it and you can kinda mold it, but the wrapping part is what got me puzzled. do you wrap the whole bird sparingly just to keep it tight and still revealing some of the wool wood or do you mummify it using the wood wool as an under cast?