A friend recently gave me a dead star-nosed mole his dog found in the snow. I am experienced in skinning and tanning, but not taxidermy.
I skinned the little fellow, and I'm considering stuffing him. The question is: How do I preserve the nose? I am assuming I can tan the skin as usual but I'm worried about the tentacly nose shriveling up.
I also left the feet on the carcass (which I saved just in case). The feet are bare and have big claws. Should I preserve the actual feet and reattach, and if so, what is the best way to do it?
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Molding the nose and feet are the only way really to preserve the little features. You can inject with master blend tow part epoxy, that will work as well, but if you left the real feet on the carcus, I do not know what you are really going to do. It would have been better to leave them attached. You can clean the leg bones off, cut them at the knee, and then attach them to the form you make. Then just build them up with thread and cotton. It is really a tough job working with such small animals and without having taxidermy background it may prove ot be quite difficult, but then anything worht doing is worth the effort.
Good luck and if you need any questions answered, let me know. feel free to email me.
Hi.
I know this is too late, but if you ever get another one please keep us in mind. We do freeze dying and have since 1980 full time. We could have freeze-dried the whole little critter for you and he would have turned out really nice. We have done a number of them. We do everything from mice to Lizards to big pan fish {Crappie and perch and sunfish} to unborn fawns. And just about any other little critter that is hard to do otherwise. It is to late to freezedry it now that you have skun him out . The nose would of needed a bit of touch up with the fine points but that is all you would of had to do .
Thanks for your time.
Have a great day/night.
Galen Getting
Edgewater Taxidermy
Click here see our website.
http://www.uslink.net/~hdg
Freeze-drying had never occured to me, but that may have been the best way to go.
Anyway, I took the feet off the carcass and will see if I can preserve them independently and sew 'em back on. I recall one of my professors talking about preserving turtles by soaking them in alcohol and then letting them dry out. I'm wondering if that will work with the feet. In terms of the epoxy, I will look into how to do that as well.
On a similar note with the epoxy (and this might become another post in the furture once I've researched it a bit) I'm wondering if that would work with innards as well. I'm currently a college student who works in the science lab with all the dead things/parts in jars, and injecting them with epoxy might be a bit like plastination. I think I will try that on an extra liver or cat heart lying around and see how well it works.