Sam Black Crow or Adventures in Taxidermy

The problem with not writing for a while is that you forget what exactly you were going to say. This is especially problematic when you’re doing updates based on what you did on certain days and whatnot- you forget the order of things as time goes on and what seemed really relevant at the time you thought about posting becomes a background event when you actually get ‘round to doing  your writeup. Abbreviations can become meaningless, annotations pointless, and doodles, while always amusing, a mystery. This is why you should always type your fieldnotes. Well, that, and physical notebooks can be stolen out of the back of your car when you’re in Disney World. RIP Little Orange Notebook, and Copper-Covered Lost-Themed Notebook, gone but not forgotten.

Anyways, while I was in California, I learned how to prep a bird study skin. I’ve always liked birds, but I got really into birdwatching out there. Corvids are my favorite. There’s been a lot written about how unbelievably smart crows, ravens, magpies (the best corvid!), and their relatives are. I could (and occasionally do) go on about how beautiful and brilliant these creatures are, but this is actually a post about taxidermy. Sort of. For your further edification, have a short video about New Caledonian Crows, which are smarter than your average human toddler. They make tools. They have a head the size of a walnut and they make tools. They don’t just use sticks to pull bugs out of holes, they will actively shape them and incorporate new materials.

When you’re done with that, here’s a video of a magpie irritating a significantly larger predator and then stealing its food. Skip to 3:38 for the good stuff, other than that it's just a fox peeing on things.

Oh. Another thing I wanted to do, Your Friend the Turkey Vulture. Note to self, write that.

Anyways, corvids. Wait, no, this is a post about taxidermy.

This is Sam Black Crow.

This bird was roughly two years old when he died of what was most likely poison. We don’t actually know what killed him, but it wasn’t a predator or any injury. He was found in a baseball field. I made a study skin out of him.

A study skin is different than a taxidermy mount because a study skin is designed to make all of the external parts of a bird visible. This is really important for species that look a lot like other species. Many warblers and finches resemble each other, as do many of the thrushes. With a crow, it’s pretty easy to tell that it’s a crow- even in areas where crows and ravens overlap. Here in Chicago, the rule of thumb is that if you see a black corvid, it’s an American Crow or a Black-Billed Magpie. Magpies aren’t supposed to live in Chicago- it’s not part of their natural range- but they are extremely well-established in both Millennium and Grant Parks, and I’ve seen some in Lincoln Park, too. I’ve also seen some on Museum Campus, but that’s mostly ACRO territory. There may or may not be ravens- they used to live here extensively, but now not so much. Ravens really got pushed out of the Midwest. We also get fish crows occasionally, but if you’re familiar with ACROs, it’s not too tough to tell them apart. Blue Jays are also up here, but if you can’t tell the difference between a crow and an adult Blue Jay, you have a larger problem than I am capable of addressing.

There were a lot of birds to choose from initially- a woodpecker, a… Swainson’s hawk, I think… a California quail, several different songbirds, and two really large American Crows. I wanted one of the crows because corvids are my favorite birds. There’s a lot of mythology surrounding corvids- generally they’re tricksters, spirits of discord- but never out of spite or malice. Chaos for amusement’s sake is part of the mythological corvid’s nature, but they’re good at heart- in Inuit mythology, Crow or Raven (depends on your translation, but given the area it makes way more geographical sense to be Raven) gave humanity the sun and created the first woman (because the creator spirit lacks originality, apparently), but is also responsible for nearly starving humanity more than once, is an incorrigible kleptomaniac, and may or may not be the catalyst for the end of the world, whenever that is. If you know me at all it shouldn’t be too hard to tell why I like these birds so much. Fortunately, there were few enough people interested in cutting open a crow that nobody contested my claim to this handsome gentleman.

Look at that wing. Magnificent.

 I didn’t know he was male when I chose him. Had he been female, he would have been Samantha Black Crow, but Sam he was, as I discovered when I dissected his body cavity.

No actual pictures of me dissecting his body cavity. That would have been kinda messy.

To make a study skin, you first make a careful incision down the stomach. You don’t want to cut into the body cavity- this project didn’t smell any worse than a traditional butcher shop. These birds had been frozen before decomp really got going, and since I didn’t pierce the intestines or stomach cavity, nothing malodorous escaped. You use a lot of cornmeal to sop up the blood and keep it from getting all over the skin. If you have an anatid- a duck or a goose- you also scrape away the fat with a serrated spoon. This takes forever, so it was pretty good that none of us had a duck.

No pictures of internal organs. Promise. Look how fluffy he is! I think it would be lovely to hold a live crow, given how lovely they are to hold post-mortem.

The messiest part is scooping out the brain. Crows have enormous brains for their head size, and getting the whole thing out took a while. Then once you clean out all the remaining body tissue, the cornmeal that you used to soak up any mess, and dust the inside of the body with borax, you stuff the bird with cotton, mount it on a stick, cross the legs, and sew it up.

The skull is left in the body and you use the hole you used to remove the brain. In taxidermy, you replace the bird’s eyeballs with glass eyes, but you don’t do that for a study skin. Instead, you stuff the eye sockets with cotton.

 It’s pretty much the last thing you do. You then put the skin someplace to dry and you sort of pin the body into position so the wings don’t splay out or do anything funny.

Ventral perspective go!

Then you tie on a tag with all the pertinent specimen information and the name of the person who prepped the skin and you let it dry so that this excellent bird can educate people for years to come. How many years? Well, at the Field, we still have study skins from the expeditions in the 1890s. That’s a lot of people who can potentially learn from one individual animal!

So now that I’m home and have gotten the Paisley Caves under my belt, I’m going to share the rest of my camping trip with you.

 We drove through the Modoc National Forest to get to our first destination, the Paisley Caves in Oregon. Driving through Modoc was kind of a treat; it's a place from pop culture that I've always wanted to visit.

 Mount Shasta loomed in the distance. There's a famous observatory up there, but that's not where we were going. Our first stop was a tiny town near the forest called Adin. Adin is pretty much what you'd expect a tiny frontier town to be. The general store-slash-restaurant had more trophy heads than products for sale, I think.

 Alturas was our next stop. It's right on the Oregon border and is the last place you can pump your own gas before you get into Oregon. In Oregon, it is illegal to pump your own gas. You have to get help from an attendant.

 Those are the Werner Mountains you're seeing in the distance. I got pretty good at taking pictures through a truck window.

It took us several hours to get to our campsite because we constantly stopped and looked at stuff. Stuff like roadkill. Some of that actually came home with us to skeletonize. While you try to get that out of your head, have some pictures of happy students around a campfire.

 The next day was Paisley; I already told you all about that. After the caves, however, we drove and hiked around and visited other sites. We found most of a cow skeleton in an open field. Naturally, we put it in the truck and took it home with us. We also found some really neat lichens.

 The last site we visited that day was the University of Nevada's field school. They had some fantastic finds, but one of the really interesting things they showed us was this backhoe trench taken by one of their geologists. See that thin pale line? That's a line of ash from Mt. Mazama, the volcano that erupted about 7,700 years ago and shot ash two miles into the atmosphere before becoming Crater Lake. This ash blanket went as far east as Utah and as far south as Las Vegas; nobody's sure how far west it goes.

 On the last full day, we drove through Nevada to stay at a place called Steven's Camp. It was at the end of a place called High Rock Canyon, and it took us many hours to get there. That whole 'constantly stopping' thing.

This is a plant known as yampa. It's got a variety of other names. It's pretty delicious- kinda nutty, kinda carroty. We pulled them out of the ground and ate them- one of our guest lecturers did his thesis on yampa growth patterns and paleoindian harvesting, so we thought we'd give it a try.

 All the white things are yampa flowers.

 After the yampa, our next stop was Surprise Valley. Surprise Valley is a paleoindian hunting site and lithic manufacturing site. You can't take two steps without finding an obsidian flake, and there's full points everywere.

 Hey look, more woodrat nests!

The real reason we stopped in Surprise Valley was to take a look at some prehistoric hunting blinds. These are horseshoes of stacked stone about a meter in diameter. They are located at a place called Cowhead Slough at the north end of Surprise Valley.

 Here's some of my classmates demonstrating how they work.

And here's two of my classmates pretending to be deer.

 This is buckwheat. Did you know its flowers were so pretty?

 This is a pretty common sight out here. Farmers put dead coyotes up on the fence to either scare away other coyotes or to brag.

In other news, we have a new coyote skeleton in our collection!

 I'll write a bit more about Steven's Camp later, but for now enjoy this picture of me cuddling a kangaroo rat, which is pretty much the best animal that exists.

 The last site we visited before we went home was a fossil bed home to a bunch of extinct rhinos and camels. Enjoy their bones!

 Actually, I take that back. Our last stop was Cedarville... which is either Nevada or California, I'm not sure. It's kind of an adorable place.

And then we were home!