This must be some kind of record! I got in a turkey today that was killed and frozen in April 1998. The customer wants a flying mount so I took it out of the double plastic garbage bag wrappings and looked it over. The head has visible freezer burn but not an issue since I use freeze-dried heads anyway. The feet and legs look amazingly well but I inject them with Masters Blend on all my birds. Having never dealt with a specimen frozen this long (previous record was bobcat frozen for 5 years), what should I expect in the way of dehydration of the skin and should I just inject it sight-unseen before attempting to skin it? I have it thawing now and plan on skinning it ASAP. No idea why the customer waited so long but this is the first work he has brought to me after being treated badly by a competitor. Thanks.
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I have heard great stories of a product called Stop Rot....it supposedly works on freezerburned skins. If the skin is very burned, maybe you could soak it in the Stop Rot?
If it's a Merriams, I have a flying turkey mount for sale...flying to the left, mounted this year. If I remember right it has an 8" beard and some decent spurs. If you are interested, send me an email and I can get some pictures back to you, or anyone else that is interested. Asking $500 plus shipping.
Thanks
You really won't know until you skin it out. I have had one come in that was stored for a long time ( I know it had been at least 3 years but not really sure). luckily they wanted a dead mount. Where it had been moved around in the freezer (I asusme things piled on top of it ) it had a lot of broken feathers. So with the dead mount, I was able to get things look pretty good.
The skin was really dry, it took a lot of time to skin. but after I got the skin off, I rehydraded it with water, liqua-cure and it worked out ok, I then used a wire wheel to get the fat off.
One thing, was the legs where stuck. I could not get them to rehydrade well. So since it was a dead mount, I just painted them. It looked ok, but I would have liked to get the feet more plump looking. I started to replace the legs, and move the spurs to extra pair of legs I had. But this was the person's first turkey, and I have not done this yet, and wanted to make sure things went ok.
Rob
This stuff is awesome, rehydrates very stiff skins. I'm ashamed to say that when cleaning out a freezer I found a Chiloe Widgeon that I could never seem to throw away yet I could never find the time to mount. I remembered that I had bought this duck before I got married and I had been married 16 years at that point. I threw it away but then decided out of curiosity to thaw it in kemal-4. I skinned it and soaked it again and amazingly was able to mount it.
When you say you thawed it in Kemal, do you mean you submersed the entire bird in Kemal? Or did you inject it under the skin?
Thanks, Kirk
I put the frozen bird in a bucket of kemal-4 and thawed it. I then skinned it and soaked it again. Kemal-4 will not cause slippage.