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| Top - Scottish Ram Skull, Roe buck mount. Bottom - mole skull, Harbour seal skull. Product images from The Weird & Wonderful and The Fox Den Shop; products no longer available. |
My birthday is swiftly approaching and, though everyone I know who is nice enough to spoil me has already organised themselves, If I could afford to be decadent I'd get something from the above list and treat myself.
Taxidermy, though I can appreciate it, has never really been my thing; it's always been bones. Skull are so stripped and matter-of-fact - there's no room for the fripperies of decoration that taxidermy delights in. Only the bare essentials are visible. (I'd perhaps make an exception for a muntjac mount, however.)
I spent all my childhood summers on the bleak and windy north-east coast, where if I was careful and kept my eyes open I could find tern skulls and sheep bones. My current collection features a variety of bones (sheep, deer, seagull and cow) and some fantastic skulls (deer, rabbit, seagull, tern), but I'd love to add some more unusual pre-cleaned pieces - possibly carved skulls, a jacob's ram skull or perhaps some reptilian pieces, but these are the bare bones (pun unfortunately intended) of what I'd like. How cool are mole skulls? A full skeleton would be amazing, but let's start small.
Fee
I love animal skulls. They are so beautiful! I'd love to get my hands on one too, when we went to snowdonia earlier this year one of my friends managed to find a sheep skull to take home with him, i was so jealous!
ReplyDeleteThey're wonderful; full skeletons are great, but slightly out of my price range. I'd love a ram skull dearly!
DeleteI envy people, who can just go somewhere into the wild and find bones. I managed only to get a rat skull and obtaining it required some... strange actions (no, I didn't kill the animal). Cities are good only for pigeon remains, but I hate pigeons so much I don't want their bones in my house.
ReplyDeleteIt's relatively easy to find bones in the highlands, where there's a great variety of wildlife; we stay on the coast line with a lot of nearby farms, so it's relatively easy to find the bones of sea birds and livestock. We also know one of the river baillies (manager of the river), who lets us know if there's anything interesting.
DeleteI love bones and taxidermy, would love a collection one day! No good bones around my area that don't need serious rotting flesh cleaned off and then they are only tiny.
ReplyDeleteBlegh, I hate cleaning bones too; there's some pretty low maintenance ways of doing it, however (I've buried skulls before, and one bone blogger I saw used a baby bottle cleaner to remove the flesh.
DeleteI once found a full sheep's skeleton in a quarry - unfortunately this was when I was a kid and I wasn't allowed to keep it.
ReplyDeleteAww man - I've been that kid too. :(
DeleteI love horns and antlers, but the idea of coming across dead animal remains and taking bones from it is really icky to me. Then again, the only dead animals in NYC are rats and pigeons. heh
ReplyDeleteYeah, I don't blame you there; the countryside is much better for that!
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