When I am going to mount a turkey as a decoy, what should you do to keep the feathers really tight and strong. Should you just use dry preservative or silicone or something else. Any suggestions would be good.
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You don't need to do anything special for decoys. I prepare them like any bird, skin, flesh, wash, colemans, tumble, borax and mount. The wings, I take out the humerous and just pin the wings in place. After they dry, if they are still loose I'll open them from the bottom a little and generously put in some hot glue. This mixes with surrounding feathers and really locks them down. I use the really head, just skin up over the top pull everything out, cleanup and I use magic sculpt to rebuild the inside of the head because I use a 12 ga. wire with a loop and put it in the head. I then leave about 18" of wire to put in the body. I then build the neck using 1" foam neck material and bring the skin back over and glue it to the foam. When I mount the bird, I do the head first, position it and fill the neck with cotton, then mount as normal. I leave about 10" of wire out the legs to stick the bird in the ground. After it's all dry I'll spray it with a liberal coating of good hair spray. But don't worry about being so accurate, these are only DECOYS. My oldest one now is 5 years old and it still looks good. If feathers come out, so what...
good luck
I've dont that with a (bearded) hen and a mallard that I mounted to a remote controll boat! USE CAMP DRY!
Done that,