I am starting with a skinned bird. This particular bird will be using a cast head and feet, therefore I have altered the normal skinning process slightly. To begin with, I skinned ventrally... then the customer decided he wanted artifical cast feet.. so... I to make things easier on myself.. I decided to change my ventral incision to a dorsal over the back, leg to leg incision. This allows me to completely remove the feet.

Breast side. Considering I already had the bird skinned ventrally, I went ahead and inverted the skin and sewed up my ventral incision from the inside. As you can see, I have a completely inside out bird now with no apparent incision. .

Here I have marked where I will make my dorsal leg to leg incision. You can clearly see the individual feather tracts here, and the lack of feather butts on the back side of the leg back towards the tail. I will follow this natural line to make my incision. The feet have already been removed at the feather line


After he comes out of the spin cycle for the last time, I use a shop vac on reverse and blow dry the skin. This is a critical point as most people don't get their birds feathers dry. By using just forced air, and no heat, I can spend additional time drying the bird. Notice, I did not tumble. If you take your finger and back brush the feathers, you can see if the down is dried. It should be quite fluffily. If your bird is completely dried.. It should already start to take shape and look like a bird long before you ever even put a body inside it.

Here we have the parts ready to assemble. I am using a wrapped body, a wrapped neck, a cast head, and cast feet with a wrapped drumstick. The body of this bird was crushed during shipping or with the final kill, and was a loss.. There fore I had to use measurements out of the catalogue to aim for the right size body. The drumsticks were a loss as well. Therefore.. I erred on the side of caution and made everything a little smaller than what I felt they should be especially the drumsticks.. I would much rather be too small than too large. The neck is wrapped with Braided Nylon cord from Home depot glued around a piece of 14 guage wire. I then wrapped a piece of necking material along the bottom side to make the trachea. I then used yarn to wrap around the base of the neck as this bird had a very thick neck at the base. The cast feet have a drumstick wrapped out of tow and secured with string.

Here you see all the parts assembled minus the head. Notice the drumsticks do look rather small. I have done this intentionally in case I run into any problems posing the cast feet. You can see where the opposite side leg wire has exited the form and has been cinched down. I will cover this with hot glue to ensure that it does not slip out during the mounting process.

Here he is with the skin over the form.... as you can see I have yet to sew him up. To sew up the dorsal leg to leg, I start in the middle above the tail and work towards one leg. The leg skin will wrap around the bottom of the drumstick and then it can be glued down. It is really quite simple, and there is so much fuss back there that the chances of you seeing a seem are slim to nil. As far as competitions go, how often does a judge look there for a seam??.Here he is all sewed up now. Sorry I didn't take pics, but my fingers are so fat, you couldn't see anything anyways.. But it's just the same as sewing up a ventral incision. Notice how everything is starting to take shape already. This is for the most part due to correct anatomy of the body. The feathers want to lay correctly on their own... with very little adjusting. I went ahead and pinned the wings in place just to get them out of the way. I will go over that a little later when we get farther along and grooming begins

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