#prep process post

[deadbirdsdaily]

Two juvenile Cooper’s Hawk wings from different individuals. You don’t notice the individual variation until it’s right in front of you.

[deadbirdsdaily]

Prep No. KHE89

The main muscles that power flight are located in the chest of the bird, but thin tendons connect these muscles to control specific motions of the wings. Though a little morbid, during prep, it’s incredibly educational (and maybe fun…) to experiment with which tendons control which movements.

And I think that’s the last pelican post!

[deadbirdsdaily]

Flickers always remind me to feel lucky to live in a world with birds.

Something about an earth-toned bird with highlighter orange feather shafts always gets to me (on the East Coast Norther Flicker’s have yellow feather shafts)

[deadbirdsdaily]

One of the data points we take during prep is skull ossification. Baby birds start out with a thin single layer skull and as they age they develop a thicker two layers skull. Most orders of birds have a fully ossified skull when they fledge from the nest but passerines take a bit longer, so it can give us a lot of information about how old a bird is.

This Fox Sparrow died by hitting a window in December, and from the outside appeared identical to an adult bird, but because of the presence of a bursa near the cloaca and this partially ossified skull, I know it was a first year bird.

Incredibly, banders can determine skull ossification on a live bird by looking through the thin skin. I'm not entirely sure how they pull that off, because I typically have to remove the brain and look through the skull in the light to feel confident that I'm actually looking at a partially ossified skull. I do so many non-passerines that I don't get enough practice.

In the first photo, I circled the window section that appears transparent compared to the rest of the skull. I also included a diagram of the skull ossification process under the break.

[deadbirdsdaily]

Packing up wings for the conference workshop!

They’re tagged already with prep numbers so that the museum can keep track of them on the loan but these are all unprepped for the conference participants to do!

[deadbirdsdaily]

Prep No. KHE116

Steller’s Jay

Cyanocitta stelleri

This is a workshop wing, so cleaned by a conference workshop participant. Some minor repairs and re-pinning by me. My prep number for museum records.

[deadbirdsdaily]

When you donate a salvaged bird to the museum, please record as many location details as possible. The more data we have on a bird, the more valuable they are to research which in turn helps living birds!

Coordinates are great! If you just put the address, consider recording the county. Yes, I can and do look up the county but my hands are usually covered in dead bird, so it’s less fun. You get a gold star from me if you write down the county!

That being said “my deck” did make me laugh more than it should.

[deadbirdsdaily]

An Assortment of Bird Testes

Left to right: Rock Dove/Pigeon, Cedar Waxwing, Violet Green Swallow

The two pale ovals in each of these photos are the bird’s male gonads, tucked along the back wall of the internal organs right above the kidneys. Bird testes change size depending on breeding condition so they aren't always obvious, which is why it's taken me so long to share a photo, but now I’ve got a small collection of photos from breeding birds. The violet green swallow particularly was in great breeding condition…

The testes aren’t always the same size (I believe some species can lose one sort of like the fact that most female birds only have one ovary). Thus Brown Creeper had two very different sized testes.