WARNING! THIS POST IS NOT FOR THE SQUEAMISH!
Last night as we were leaving the house, I noticed a chipmunk that had been hit by a car just by the foot of our driveway.
Being the good homeschooling mother that I am, my first thought upon seeing the squished critter was, “Aw. I hope the kids don’t get too upset.”
But the second was, “Hmm. I wonder if I could save the fur for our nature box. That would be totally cool.” So I asked PisecoDad to scoop it up with a shovel into an old bucket, I put a lid on it, and we left it behind the house for the night.
I spent the night and early morning contemplating chipmunk tanning, got a little advice from PisecoSis, Pappy and Fran, and this morning I asked JediBoy if he really wanted to do this. He did.
We made a quick shopping trip to buy cheap metal implements: paring knives, crab forks, teaspoons, thumb tacks, disposable cake pans, tongs, kitchen shears and also latex gloves and sea salt. Things that could touch a dead creature and never have to be brought inside the house, much less confused with our everyday flatware.
I really didn’t think I was going to be able to do this. I’m a big eye-averter in the face of gross and disgusting. I never took a single biology class, so I have never dissected anything. We’ve never been a hunting or fishing family so I’ve never skinned anything. But something took hold inside of me and I thought, “This is too cool to pass up. We can do this.”
And we did!
Now I’ve already warned you once, but next I’m going to post several pictures of the work we did, and if you’d look away from road kill, you probably don’t want to see this.
Here is what we started with. PisecoDad was kind enough to scrape away most of the viscera this morning, just getting the bulk of the insides out. But then he just dumped it into this bucket, which also had dirt, maple seeds and a random plastic lid inside already.
This is what the munk looked like when we first set him in the disposable pan. I had him belly-up, because that’s how we would work on him, but JediBoy was concerned that there wasn’t any fur to save, so we flipped the munk over to have a look.
JediBoy was very eager to get started. We each mainly used a crab fork and a paring knife to hold and scrape. I snipped up the belly (where it hadn’t already been split by the fatal accident) using the kitchen shears, and used the tongs when we needed to flip or pull the body.
After we did the roughest work, we needed to pin the body down so it wouldn’t keep slipping. We used an old scrap of lumber from the shed and pinned it down with thumbtacks. This picture was taken by JediBoy, and you can see BabyGirl signing “night-night” - she seemed to think the creature had just gone to sleep. Interestingly, she never referred to what was in the pan as a chipmunk.
Here’s another really gross shot. (Oh, come on, I know I have a huge audience of 13-year-old homeschooled boys reading this with great anticipation!) After we had been working for about an hour, we realized that our stellar implements and long taxidermy training were not going to be good enough to preserve the legs, tail or head. When the body split originally, the two front legs were both on the same side of the split, so it would have looked a little funky anyway. This picture shows how the skin looked without the legs. Notice (you 13-year-old boys, you) the mob of flies on the head - and this was after JediBoy shooed most of them away so I could get a picture.
And here is our pinned and stretched skin without all the extremities. JediBoy loved that you could see the stripes through the skin.
Once we scraped a bit more, to the best of our extensive taxidermy abilities, we decided it was time to salt it and leave it for the afternoon. Here, JediBoy is starting to add the salt, and wiping his nose at the same time because we were using generous blobs of Vicks VapoRub to mask the odors, and, well, Vicks is made to make your nose run.
We were sure to pile the salt up and around - and it looked like this when we left it for the afternoon.
One last picture for today - I promise. JediBoy was very interested in the munk’s teeth, so we saved one part of the lower jaw, with an incisor and several teeny weeny molars. We didn’t do a great job of cleaning it right away, but we’ll get to that soon. He also wanted to inspect the tiny paws, so we saved the one with the least damage.
Based on what I’ve read in books and online in the past 24 hours, I think we’ll keep salting and scraping for a few days to a week, until none of the salt discolors with absorbed moisture. Then I think we’ll quickly tan it using mink oil (I read that tip on The Taxidermy Forum, where I spent most of my BabyGirl-is-sleeping, get-on-the-computer time this afternoon). I’m sure it’s not perfect, but I have my fingers crossed that I’ve done a good enough job that we’ll be able to keep the fur.
The bad news is that first thing this morning we left a pile of seed on the step - usually gone in under an hour - and it’s still there, untouched, so it seems that this chipmunk was our beloved Mun-Mun. BabyGirl keeps climbing into the window and saying, “Mun-Mun?” to which I reply, “Oh, do you see a chipmunk?” and she says, “Noooooooo.” Sigh.
All the same, I think this has been a great experience for JediBoy and for me. It’s not something I would have ever put on a list of things to do (First Grade Zoology: Tan Chipmunk Hide) but it was cool, and empowering, and interesting. And after we’re all done, we’ll clean the implements and save them in a special box in the shed, just in case…
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