i just got a black bear back from the tannery yesterday for a life-size mount. the guy wants it standing on hind legs with front arms up. it lost a basketball sized spot of hair on the lower part of the belly by the penis and also some hair under both of the front arm pits, the two worst possible spots for the pose he wants.
before i try and talk him into another pose what are my options for fixing these bad spots, can they be patched and how? also, i prepped and sent 2 other bears at the same time as this one and they came back fine, what could have went wrong with this one.
thanks
gary
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I'm not sure how familar you are with bear or amount of experience you have, so I'm just going to throw out some basics. Are you sure it's bald and not just thin spots? Bear have thin sparse hair on parts of the belly and under the legs (arm pit area). If it didn't slip than I'm pretty sure that would be the problem. After tanning you are likly looking at epidermis loss. That is fairly normal to see. It is taken care of by dying that part of the hide black. When mounted and dyed the hair looks a lot fuller . You can also inform and educate the customer about how the hair is naturally thin in those areas and see if they want to pick a position that will show off the nice coat of hair on it's back.good luck
bears can be troublesome because of those sparsely haired groin and pit areas. ive had good results with plain old RIT dye from the grocery store or Hionis spray dye from most taxidermy catalogs.
I've also used "upholstery and vinyl dye" in a spray can from most auto parts stores. It also works well to dye those thin spots on bear.
well, the spots are not completely bald but extremely thin, you can probably count the number of hairs
Heres what ive done i usually save tanned trimmings and for situations like this i actually try to match the hair as close as possible to the surrounding hair cut out the bald spots and sew in the new trimmings and then dye it just make sure your hair flow is close to even as possible.If its the fault of the tanner i usually eat the cost of my time but if its just natural rubbing done by the bear i inform my customer of his options and charge accordingly works well for me.
I've used this option on more than one bear. Try to get
the seams as close to the crotch and armpit crease area as
possible. In extreme cases I've even attached indiviual
hairs to the seams using 5 second nail glue, teadious but
it works