#prep process post

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.

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)

Packing up wings for the conference workshop!

Prep No. KHE116

Steller’s Jay

Cyanocitta stelleri

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!

This week is another zoo bird that’s been necropsied, though I don’t know the cause of death unfortunately. They’re a Red-crested Turaco (Tauraco erythrolophus).

There are perks to being willing to do a lot of sewing like getting to work on some beautiful unique birds. You can see that their abdomen has already been cut open and their organs removed. The neck and back of the head were also cut open. The back of the head was the most challenging to sew up but I’m still pleased by the final results.

On every round skin I do, I remove one wing to make an accompanying spread wing specimen. When the skin dries it loses all it's flexibility, so the wing folded against the bird will never be extended again. You'll never be able to see the molt and plumage coloration. So preparing a spread wing specimen gives you a lot more information about the bird for research or education! And generally if you do it right, people barely notice the skin is missing anything!

We remove the wing of the bird at the "elbow" joint between the radius/ulna and the humerus. This is a diagram for Cornell Lab's Bird Anatomy activity that I added labels to for my handbook.

When skinning and removing the body, I generally skin up the humerus bone to the elbow on the inside and cut through (or disarticulate) the elbow joint. In the diagram below (from my handbook, more plugs for my handbook... see pinned post) #1 shows me skinning up to the elbow and #2 shows the disconnected joint.

If you're having trouble skinning up this far, that's okay! You can also cut at the shoulder joint and just focus on removing the body. Then you can come back and deal with the wing later.

Then to remove the wing, extend the wing and cut straight up from the elbow joint through the patagium (skin membrane that connects the wrist to the shoulder). It can be tempting to take the scapulars (shoulder feathers) or tertials (flight feathers attached to the humerus instead of the secondaries which attach to the ulna) but generally these stay with the body. In some birds with a lot of significant tertials (usually long winged seabirds like my pelican) we do actually take the tertials and humerus with the wing.

You can just cut through the feathers, you don't need to be particularly careful. It'll still look good! But if you really want to you can use water to smooth back the feathers and try to only cut through the skin.

Below the wing has been removed and B indicates the scapulars that are still with the body.

Here's another diagram from the internet, the unlabeled feathers on the right (proximal to the body) are the scapulars. So you're cutting from directly between the tertials and the secondaries straight up through the secondary coverts (lesser, median, and greater).

Full disclosure, you can remove a wing first before skinning (or if you're not planning on doing a full round skin). Just cut in the same place! It'll just be a bit harder because you'll be cutting through bone and muscle too, not just skin. I prefer to leave the wings on while I'm skinning, since it's also easier to clean the muscle from small bird wings while they're still attached.

You are left with a sizable hole in the skin, but the scapulars should hide it pretty easily. Here's the hole where the wing was removed on my cormorant (left), and without any stitches the scapulars can cover the hole (right). But you can also add a couple stitches if you really want. Sometimes I do this if I want to use a shorter button stick to tie the wings (a post for another time).

And here's the final Magpie on both sides (left has the wing and right is without), obviously it's missing a wing... but it still looks good on both sides (if I do say so myself) and the information you retain by saving a spread wing is worth it!