Game Council NSW: Caping, Tanning and Taxidermy workshop

A hunting mate of mine and I headed out west on Saturday to participate in Game Council NSW's "Bathurst Taxidermy Workshop" held at Bowman's Taxidermy. 

The workshop was led by Kev Daley in the studio he runs in the Kelso industrial area and facilitated by Dave "Bluey" Smith, Central West Game Manager for Game Council NSW. The Caping, Tanning and Taxidermy workshop is one of over a dozen hunter education short courses being run by Game Council NSW as part of its OutREACH Hunter Education initiative. We also met Mike Spray, a new addition to the Game Council NSW team; Mike has been recruited as Research and Education Officer.

As the flyer stated, the aim of the workshop was to educate hunters in the basic techniques of successful game trophy preservation in the field to ensure your taxidermist received your trophy in the best condition possible for tanning and mounting. 

Topics covered on the day included:

• Field caping 
• Skinning out the face
• Salting
• Fleshing 
• Pickling and tanning basics
• Cleaning horns, antlers and tusks 
• European mounts
• Shoulder mounting overview

Having caped close to 200 game animals for shoulder and full body mounts and skinned and butchered countless others, I know my way around a trophy animal and what I lack in speed I make up for in attention to detail. Given this experience, what I loved about Kev's workshop was his very practical explanation and the very simple steps he showed us. 

The really great thing was that Bluey had very neatly shot a feral goat a couple of hours before the workshop so that Kev had a perfect specimen to work on. Meanwhile Leanne, Kev's partner, had an old and tusky boar that a client had delivered the night before. No small task for Leanne, the boar was received frozen, a half-body cut very roughly through the mid-section, with a 10" cut at the top of the brisket that stopped underneath the jaw and a multitude of cuts around the ears where the pig had been lugged by the dogs. Like I said, quite a task!

As Kev worked on the goat, he went through what he was doing in great detail, gave participants plenty of time to ask questions and even afforded us the opportunity to get our hands dirty with some knife work on the cape.

More detail next time with some of the key points I picked up at the workshop, but for now, if you're keen on hanging few game heads at home, keep an eye out for the next workshop at Bowman's Taxidermy.

DaggaBoy's new chapter - And now, taxidermy!

As a young boy I lived on a small Mediterranean island and guns and hunting were a part of our day-to-day life. I would often help my father clean and oil his Belgium FN Browning A5 - l-abjad - the white one. We would spend hours f' id-dura f'l-għalqa tan-nannu that my father had built when he was 18. Twice a year, f'l-istaġun tal-gammiem we would head to il-wied ta-Kaproċ għall-passa. We would sit in our limestone hide, waiting for the migratory doves that chase the warm weather across Europe and Africa, and a love of hunting was born.

At our new home in Sydney we kept ferrets and had sacks full of nets that we would use to flush and catch rabbits. While the concept of hunting was still very much alive at home, there was a distinct absence of firearms as our access to private land was limited. So we netted rabbits and had them for dinner.  Easy.

In 1989 I was back in the Mediterranean visiting family and seeing the sights. High on my list of things to do was a few outings with Ziju Charlie and his new Luigi Franchi 48 AL, a very nice auto-loading shotgun built in Brescia, Italy.

It was open season on a number of migratory birds, one of which was the melvez or Song Thrush. Early one chilly December morning headed towards the fields and walked along a narrow sqaq with the Franchi in hand, keeping cover taħt ħajt tas-sejjiegħ.

We came across a couple of Song Thrush in a small ploughed field; my uncle hunched over so as not to be see and motioned for me to take the shot. Now you're probably thinking "what kind of bastard shoots a little bird sitting on the ground at 30 yards with a 12 gauge shotgun?"  Generally, I would say "a hungry one," but in this case I was just keen to have a shot!

I stood up, lined up my target looking down the sighting plain and placed the bead on the little bird. Bang. Missed. The barrel chased the little fella' as he fluttered off and I pulled the trigger again sending him tumbling into the dirt. 

Ziju Charlie cleared the action while I cleared the wall and collected the bird. Talk about excited!

As I walked back across the field with the little bird in hand, I decided to pay a visit to my second cousin who lived close by and was the village taxidermist - l-ibbalzmar tar-raħal. Ġenju had been a full-time taxidermist for 20 years so he really knew his way around a carcass! We hatched a plan to catch up the next day to skin and mount the bird. 

And so began the adventures of a 13-year-old taxidermist. 

Some translations for my readers:

• l-abjad : the white one
• f' id-dura f'l-għalqa tan-nannu : in the hunting hide at my grandfather's farm
• f'l-istaġun tal-gammiem : during the dove open season 
• il-wied ta-Kaproċ għall-passa : Kaproc Valley for the migration
• Ziju Charlie : Uncle Charlie
• sqaq : alley
• taħt ħajt tas-sejjiegħ : below a rubble wall
• l-ibbalzmar tar-raħal : the village taxidermist