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CHAPTER IV 
COLLECTING AND SKINNING BIRDS 
COLLECTING BIRDS 
Mounted Birds and Bird Skins 
The general principles of bird collecting are the same as of mammal 
collecting, and as practically the same tools, preservatives, and equipment 
are required, the prospective bird collector is referred to the preceding 
pages of this bulletin. 
By the general public, a bird specimen is usually thought of as a bird 
stuffed, mounted, or “set up” in a more or less natural or life-like attitude 
for exhibition as a trophy, ornament, or a scientific or educational exhibit. 
When a professional taxidermist is available, the amateur who merely 
wishes to preserve a trophy will generally find it best to send the bird “in 
the flesh” in as clean and fresh a condition as possible. 
Mounted birds are difficult and expensive to prepare, bulky to store, 
easily broken or damaged, and the colours are invariably subject to fading 
in daylight. In scientific museums and large private collections, scarcely 
a fraction of one per cent of the bird specimens are mounted, and nearly 
all such specimens were originally collected as “bird skins” — also known 
as “scientific skins” or “study skins.” The “scientific skin,” so-called, 
is the skin of the bird, removed, cleaned, treated with preservative, with 
the skull left inside attached to the head skin, and enough loose filling 
placed inside the skin to make it resemble the dead bird. The skin is laid 
out to exhibit in the best manner the external features of the bird, the 
colours of its plumage, and the general form of bill, wings, and feet. 
Bird skins may be mounted at any later time, and the general shape 
or “make” of such skins is not important. But as by far the greater 
number of skins are kept for purposes of study, it is important, whenever 
reasonably possible, to fill and lay out the skin in a smooth, convention- 
ally uniform position for convenience in comparing series of specimens. 
Any student who has occasion to compare large series of birds and mammals 
prepared by different collectors with various methods knows how difficult 
it is to make good comparisons of colour patterns and texture when the 
feathers and fur are dried in a careless, rumpled and unnatural state. 
Some of this waste of time and material is due to careless and inexperienced 
field collectors, but much is also due to the urgent desire for quantity 
rather than quality by market-hunting professionals and expeditions that 
are avowedly out to be first in any imperfectly explored area, and get 
as many specimens as can be picked up and possibly named as new. Dr. 
Witmer Stone, for many years curator and director in the Academy of 
Natural Science of Philadelphia, which is noted for the quality of its 
scientific material, wrote in 1933 ( The Auk, 50:2, 243), “There is no 
excuse in these days for the carelessly made specimens which have hindered 
research in the past and made our museum collections unsightly.” 
