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 tern, 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 lefc 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 



