Encountered this beautiful youngster in a state park yesterday. It’s a juvenile Bald Eagle, likely in their first year. In the United States, Eagles require special permits for possession. The museum I’m at can possess them, but they have to go through the national repository first to be distributed to museums and tribes. So we alerted a ranger, and they called Fish and Wildlife to pick her up, and hopefully they’ll get where they’re needed.
A lot of young raptors don’t make it through their first year alone in the wild. It’s hard to learn to hunt consistently and be independent. They looked quite peaceful spread out under the leaves.
Traveling around the country with a cooler of dead birds isn’t as fun as you might think. I have to keep worrying about them unfreezing.
Currently cursing my ADHD, and worrying I’m confusing the hell out of nice zoo employees because I don’t know when I’m going to drop off the wings at their freezer.
Posts will likely be a little sparse for the next couple weeks! I’m preparing to lead a workshop on wing prep, which is very exciting, but that means I might not have a lot of time for my own prep.
…also I’m kind of hoping the new update debacle will be rectified by the time I start posting regularly again in April. I love knowing how far my dead bird content travels, and have thoroughly enjoyed some excellently strange reblogs. Also knowing that my most popular post is a cormorant wing, a generally overlooked of reviled bird but one of my favorites, has been lovely. Thank you all for that!
i'm currently painting a barred owl and curious if you've ever worked with one/know anything about them? thanks!
A warning in advance for this potentially off topic response… I can’t help myself when it comes to owls. I am a wildlife educator, and I must educate.
IN PREP
I have only prepared one Barred Owl and it was actually the first bird I did, and it was before I learned proper technique at my undergrad museum. I just did spread wings and feet for biofacts. I should do a full skin though, and might have an opportunity soon! I’m running a work shop in April teaching spread wings at a conference, and I’ll probably bringing a few Barred Owl wings since my current museum has so many*, so I should do one of the skins when I get back!
IN AMBASSADOR EDUCATION
I do know a good deal about Barred Owls, but mostly from working live ambassador Barred Owls at my college raptor program. Before I get on my owl soapbox, I think it’s important to acknowledge that owls are amazing birds but I’ve had so many negative experience working with them that it potentially influences the way I talk about them.
Owls are objectively incredible birds with amazing adaptations and fascinating life histories. However, they are also notorious for adapting poorly to life in captivity when they matured in the wild. So a lot of raptor centers have nonreleasable owl ambassadors that came into wildlife rehabs too injured to be released and then were placed in education, and unfortunately these owls often don’t adapt well to human care. They typically never get over their fear response or develop positive associations with people. Instead they develop learned helplessness so they’ll sit apparently “calmly” on the glove, but they’re actually chronically stressed and have to be forced to interact with their handlers. A happy raptor should be enthusiastic to work with their human handlers and anticipate being rewarded for performing behaviors. Wyatt (my falconry bird who I started working with at the education program) immediately flies to the glove or the scale when I begin sessions. Most owls consistently perform escape behaviors (crashing into walls trying to fly away, or aggressing) and have to be restrained with gear to get on the glove.
Larger owls (Barred Owls and Great Horned Owls) seem to be the most challenging at least from my anecdotal experience, I’ve known of a few Screech Owls and a Northern Hawk Owl who’ve adapted well to captivity. Our Screech Owl, Odin, was amazing. I never had any of our other owls enthusiastically fly to my glove.
Odin being adorable and readily engaging with training
I do know one center that’s been successful with wild Barred Owls (Shaver’s Creek! Awesome center! They even train their snakes) but they don’t do offsite glove education with their owls. They’re just on display at the center. We were at a serious disadvantage because we HAD to do offsite education so birds had to be restrained on the glove and taken to other places for programs. People couldn’t just come see them in their aviaries.
I worked with four Barred Owls in undergrad (Luna, Buddy, Oscar, and Skye). Oscar was my favorite but mostly because his spirit never got broken (maybe I watched Spirit too many times growing up?). But that just meant that he continually tried to attack his handlers instead of developing learned helplessness. Also he was a slightly unusual color: more olive brown grey than the usual Barred Owl grey. Fortunately for Oscar, he was rehomed to a center that’s could do display education (less stressful than glove education) and lived with a mate for his last couple years. None of these owls ever took food on the glove (sign of comfort and crucial part of positive reinforcement training, you can’t reinforce a behavior of the learner refuses to take the reinforcer). Honestly working with them and seven other nonreleasable rehab owls was soul sucking. So I’m unfortunately a little anti-owl now.
Oscar, a beautiful owl; I hope he had a happy of short retirement
But I really want to work with an imprint owl someday, and hopefully develop a positive mental relationship with owls again! Because they really are amazing birds! They just have tiny little brains that aren’t super good for learning new things…**
More and more centers are moving towards human imprint owls (either owls that come into rehab really young or captive bred owls) and these birds are so much happier as ambassadors! They can be socialized with people before they develop a fear responses. People in the US have mixed reactions to captive bred raptors in captivity but they’re really common in other parts of the world (in the UK you basically can’t do education with wild raptors). Raptors in education should have the highest welfare possible, and a lot of the time this means a captive bred bird. And a lot of the time, humane euthanasia is the kindest thing you can do for a nonreleasable owl.
IN GENERAL
As for random Barred Owl facts outside of education! They’re Strix owls so related to beautiful Ural Owls and Great Grey Owls (and also Spotted Owls)!
They’re originally native to the Eastern US but have been spreading West since deforestation has lead to more open woodland habitats. Spotted Owls strictly prefer old growth forest, and Barred Owls are a lot more generalist.
They mostly eat rodents like most owls, but also really like crayfish. It can make them turn sort of pinkish (Source: the captive Barred Owls at Shaver’s Creek)
They’re highly territorial and are known to attack people (my mom has been mobbed a couple of times).
Pairs duet together, and they’re known for their “who cooks for you” call.
Like many owls, new feathers fluoresce pink under black light so you can age feathers really accurately.
Spotted Owls are named for the spotting on their chests, so people assume that Barred Owls are named for their chests pattern too. But their chest is actually streaky. They’re named instead for the barred back feathers (think barred rock chicken if you’re familiar) that both species share. As far as I know, Europeans just “discovered” 🙄them first… so they got the more general name, and then Western science had to come up with something more specific for Spotted Owls.
I hope that answered your question, and wasn’t entirely off topic… ambassador raptor welfare is something I am really passionate about, so I can’t resist an opportunity to discuss it.
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NOTES
*Since they’re invasive in my state, the state wildlife department does culls to attempt to protect Spotted Owls, and the collected individuals go to the museum. I have complicated feelings about this since a big reason the Spotted Owls are endangered is habitat loss, so a lot of places the Barred Owls are wouldn’t actually sustain Spotted Owls populations anyways… but in places there still are Spotted Owls, the Barred Owls ARE outcompeting them, so maybe it helps? I don’t feel confident enough to take a stand either way though, I’d leave that to the biologists studying them specifically.
**this is a reductive subjective opinion and documenting animal intelligence is very difficult. Please remember I was traumatized by owls… but they do have objectively tiny brains
FURTHER READING
IAATE Owl Position Statement
Steve Martin’s Writing on Owls (not that Steve Martin)
Hello, I love your blog! Can I ask how you got into preserving bird specimens? (How you learned/how you found work in it especially)
Also, on the varied thrush specimen, is there something filling the eye sockets that make them look white, or is there some kind of treatment done?
Thanks!
To summarize my best suggestions for working in museums are find a place to volunteer, consider grad school, and make connections. The museum field is really welcoming from my experience. I know there's some people who've reached out to me via this blog who are actually working in the field for money right now though, so maybe they have more thoughts? (I won't put them on the spot but please reblog or comment if you have suggestions, I'd love them too)
The long story is, I kind of stumbled into it actually! While I was raised by a mammologist mother who always encouraged me to pick up dead mammals as a child for her to send to her colleagues (picturesque childhood of everyone's dreams I'm sure), I didn't really have any interest in doing my own prep for a long time.
Then during my senior year of undergrad, I really wanted to take one more bird class and the specimen preparation class sounded like more fun than the avian management class that involved raising ducklings for meat. It's hypocritical as a meat eater who frequently works with dead animals... but I'm still not sure I could raise something for weeks and then send it to the butcher. To my surprise, I discovered I really enjoyed preparing specimens and ended up taking the follow up advanced course and volunteering through the summer and following year until I found a job.
I've been working on materials like the prep guide in my pinned post to help others learn, but I personally learn best from a mentor, so if you're anything like me I highly encourage you to find someone to teach you! Especially because most of the birds I prepare are native species that are illegal to possess in the U.S. without proper permits. Most museums that are actively building their collections will welcome volunteers! So just reach out to your local museum or university collection. But if you also want to look at my prep guide, please do, I need people who aren't experienced preparators to look at it and tell me if it makes any sense.
Finding work is a bit more challenging... I'm currently a grad student and all my work at the museum is volunteer. Between undergrad and grad school, I was working at a wildlife rehab as their education person so I worked with their live ambassador animals (my other passions are animal training and wildlife education) mostly, but they were interested in building an education collection of specimens too so I got to do that for them too.
Unfortunately, even though you don't need a degree to be an excellent preparator, most museum jobs I've applied to and looked at wanted a Master's degree which is why I'm back in school. Furthermore, a lot of people will volunteer to prep (like me... right now... I'm part of the problem) so there aren't too many jobs in museums that are just prep. If you're interested in this type of work as a career, you also need to learn collection management which in my experience, can involve a lot more fiddling with databases, managing loans and students, figuring out where a bunch of random ducks in your freezer came from, etc.
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As for the thrush, unlike with taxidermy, for specimens, we don't typically add glass eyes, but all the soft parts that will rot need to be removed from the skin. So instead the body and eyes are replaced with cotton which is the white you're seeing. In birds, a section of the skull is usually left in to give the skin structure and because the beak is part of the skull, but the eyes, brain, and as much muscle as possible is removed from the head.
Hi! I've been following your posts about the california condor and was curious, do you know how the bird died or any information about it in life? They're my favorite birds so I am intrigued by your work with this specimen.
I am also hoping we can get more information on this bird! They died in 2016 and we have their studbook ID number, so the collections manager is trying to track down more information on them.
They don’t have a wing tag so I can’t use the condor watch pages, and since they passed so far back I’m not sure they’d be on the tracking websites anyways. Even though it’s been so long, I’m really hoping that we can get some information. We should at least be able to figure out their parents I believe.
Since all her organs were removed during the necropsy, all I can really gather from her body is that she was really young. She still has down around her rump and her tail feathers are just growing in. The broken feathers on her wing are interesting too and there appear to be stress bars too. Stress bars or fault bars are lines in the feathers that appear when they’re growing and coincide with times of stress (often limited food since it takes a lot of protein to grow feathers). However, she’s also in really high body condition, so her parents were feeding her well. So it’s a bit of a mystery for now.
But the museum will want to have necropsy data associated with them, so hopefully I can provide a more satisfying update for you at some point! Collections managers are always very busy though, so it might take a bit.
Here are the fault bars… though they’re a little different than I’m used to so it’s possible that it’s just damage.
I just found your blog, and I also do specimen prep in a museum, so hello, be prepared for me going through, liking, and reblogging a lot of your stuff!!
Technically I do mammals, but I share the lab with the bird folks, and my boss is the ornithologist, so I'm at least adjacent, and surrounded by people with strong opinions on bird prep! And I've NEVER heard about the feather straightening technique!
Though if you're aware of someone who has a similar blog for museum prepping mammals I could learn from, please let me know!
It’s nice to find another museum preparator! I am prepared :)
It’s a great tip! I learned it from my mentor in undergrad. It also works on bent feathers on live birds (can help prevent breaks in bent pet bird or falconry bird feathers!). Hot to the touch water for live birds! NOT BOILING!
I do not know a similar mammal blog :/ I was going to say if you scroll back far enough, I’ve posted a handful of mammals. But it doesn’t look like I tagged them very reliably when I was starting out. I think they’ll be tagged #mammals or #mammal monday or maybe something else entirely. I was still figuring things out. I really thought I posted more than I did. And mammals are not my expertise compared to birds, so I’m not sure if I have any helpful advice for you.
I do mammals intermittently but I haven’t done any at my new museum while I’m in grad school. In undergrad the bird curator was also the mammal curator, so it was pretty easy to switch back and forth, and then I was working at a rehab doing all the prep. At my grad school museum, the divisions are a bit more separate so it’s been harder to get set up with the mammal managers too. There is theoretically a porcupine in the freezer with my name on it though… but scheduling reasons are putting it off. I want to prep more mammals though, so we’ll see if I get around to it.
im pretty squeamish IRL, but i absolutely adore hearing and seeing taxidermy work & similar such endeavors. i greatly admire what you do!
That’s so lovely to hear!
I probably owe my relative lack of squeamishness to being raised by a mammalogist mother who encouraged me to pick up dead things to send to her museum friends… but I am also a lot more desensitized to it than when I started preparing in college.
Sometimes overly desensitized… I usually need to remind myself that not all my friends, family, and classmates want to hear about my dead animal exploits. So having this space where people ARE excited about specimens is really nice ❤️
