136 A’ BIRD COLLECTOR’S MEDLEY: 
in the summer the difficulty is to stop them becoming decomposed too soon. 
All that can be done is to put some carbolic crystals in the throat, and, 
opening the skin of the vent, sprinkle plaster-of-Paris freely therein. I have 
heard of small Warblers being preserved pro fem. in a bottle of spirit. 
Assuming that the bird has reached the stuffing table in safety, the 
less it is pawed about the better. Never upset the lay of the back feathers 
if you can help it, and above all don’t stretch the skin of the neck and 
shoulders. A needle at the finish will do something towards putting bent 
feathers straight, but here, if anywhere, prevention is certainly better than 
cure. I always let the bird rest on a small piece of paper, so that I can turn 
the paper round instead of the bird. Be liberal with your plaster-of-Paris on 
the breast (the coarse sort with pinkish tinge is best), but don’t start cleaning 
bloodstained feathers till you have finished skinning the head; juices may 
damage the very place you have just cleaned and necessitate a second 
washing. 
To come to the all-important head—I say all-important, because on the 
amount of life you can infuse into it depends so largely the success of your 
efforts as a whole. If the head sticks (as Plover’s and Woodpecker’s 
generally do) when you try to turn it inside out, you may sometimes circum- 
vent it by removing a triangular piece of skull, but in any case go to work 
steadily and keep your temper; a violent push or pull will leave you 
brandishing the head in one hand and the remainder of the skin in the 
other—a state of things which looks foolish, though it is not necessarily fatal. 
If gentle suasion fails to entice the head through the aperture, you must 
slit the skin along the skull and get it out there, and this is generally needful 
in the case of Ducks. While the head is turned inside out, the difficulty 
of keeping the breast-feathers unstained by the neck can be got over by 
resting the latter on a piece of paper with a slit in it. The neck goes into 
the slit, and the head lies on the paper beyond. All the lower part of the 
skull must be cut away, and the brains extracted from the bottom. The 
cheek bones can be partly cut away also, and their loss subsequently 
compensated for by the insertion of wadding through the eyeholes and mouth, 
or they may be left in and clay modelled round them to fill up all cavities. 
In any case, remember that though the head may look perfect when just 
stuffed, the cheeks and also the space between the eye and beak always 
tend to shrink in the drying, and they must be very carefully filled up with 
cotton-wool or clay. If the cheek bones are removed, it will be difficult to 
keep the tow in the skull; it must be bound round with cotton. As soon 
as the head is turned back, at once restore the natural lie of the feathers 
