Sweetwater Days 10, Part 2 – Heads Up!

Well, the 2021 deer season turned out great.  I got to spend a lot of time out in the woods and enjoyed time with one of my sons and one of my grandsons.  We didn’t get any of the bigger deer I had set my sights on, but we got three deer for the freezer, including a couple small bucks.

The bucks may have been small (both six-pointers) but I still wanted to hang them on the wall.

——————————————

When my son, Travis, grandson, John, and I dropped off our deer at Tilton’s Processing, they asked us how we’d like them cut up, and how we wanted some of the meat prepared.  They also asked if we wanted them to save the heads for us.

We did.  My buck was the first buck taken on Sweetwater and Travis’s was his first buck ever.  So they weren’t big, but they were memorable.

I’m a proponent of good taxidermy.  A well-mounted deer head is incredibly beautiful, especially if it’s a big one, with tall, wide, massive antlers.

Ours didn’t have those.

Having a head mounted by a talented taxidermist is expensive, easily $1000 or more.  If you can afford it and want a beautiful piece of natural art, it’s well worth the cost.  We just couldn’t see putting $2000-plus into our two little guys.  I wanted something that would look good on the wall, but would not look ugly to my bank account.

I had just the idea.

——————————————

I was still a young man when I first started hearing about a new way that animal heads were being prepared for display.  Supposedly, in Europe hunters were cutting a portion of the skull off and leaving it attached to the antlers.  When the idea made the trip to the U.S. we called them European mounts.

Over the years, European mounts have come to usually include the whole skull, except for perhaps the bottom jaw.  The antlers are typically left naturally colored, but the skull is either bleached white, or painted.  Some even camouflage them.

European mounts are attractive and a lot cheaper than traditional “stuffed” mounts done by a taxidermist.  Even better, they can be made by anyone with even a minimum of talent.

That’s me.

——————————————

The first step in making a European-mount is to remove all the flesh from the skull.  Some people skin the skull, then boil everything that is left until the muscle and tendons let loose and can be scraped or sprayed off easily with a pressure washer.  Another option is to bury the skull for a few months to allow the flesh to decay until it can be removed easily using the same methods just mentioned.

I have buried heads in the past, as I mentioned in Deer Season 2019, Part 2, A Day of Fear and Grappling, which I posted on 10-26-2020.  That method is easy and basically free, but there are a couple problems with it.  One is that, if you are not careful enough when burying or examining the heads, the antlers can get discolored.  The other problem is dogs…well, dogs and other scavengers.  If you don’t take precautions, dogs, coyotes, etc. will dig up your heads and carry them off, or gnaw on them and potentially ruin them.

That’s what happened to me.

——————————————

When I had buried heads in the past, I’d turned an old bathtub over on the heads to keep scavengers from getting to them.  At our new home I don’t have an old bathtub.  I do have an old work shop (soon to be a hen house) with a dirt floor though.  I interred our deer heads and put an old metal bucket over them with concrete blocks on top.  Then I propped an old door across the opening to the building to keep critters out.

It didn’t work.

The next morning, as I was preparing my breakfast, I looked out the back window to see that something had torn down the barriers I had put up to keep them out.  I ran out in my robe to find that my deer’s head was untouched, but Travis’s first buck was missing. 

I located my son’s deer head within minutes.  The cheeks had been eaten but there was no apparent damage to the bone itself.  I returned it to its hole in the henhouse, covered it with dirt, bucket, and block and raised the old door, but put a livestock panel between it and the building.  That should keep hungry animals out until I could finish breakfast and get dressed.

Nope.

When I went back outside, Travis’s deer skull was GONE.  I searched and searched, covering our entire four acres and walking some of the neighboring muddy farm land, but I could not locate the head.

I felt awful.

I wouldn’t have been happy if my deer’s head had disappeared, but I have gobs of them.  The missing head was Travis’s first ever buck.  There was nothing I could do about the vanished head except keep searching, but I needed to do something different or my buck’s head would disappear too.

My experience has been that, if dogs carry off a skull to chew on, they may hide it from other dogs, but they eventually get tired of all the trouble and drag it into their yard and leave it there.  I was certainly hoping that would happen this time.

I pulled the remaining head out of the loose dirt and put it up on a shelf within the coop.  I’d leave it there until I could come up with a way to prep it that wouldn’t include the risk of losing it to dogs, coyotes, etc.  I searched some more for the missing head, then went inside to do some research, hoping the head would indeed turn up. 

I was well aware that many people who regularly make European-mounts boil the heads using propane or electricity and a bucket full of water.  Well, the bucket I’d used to cover the skulls was plenty big enough and it was metal, but the hole that had rusted in it took it out of the equation.

Then I discovered the Buck Boiler.

——————————————

The Buck Boiler is a plastic bucket with an electric heat coil.  According to the advertisements, it allows the buyer to boil the flesh loose from a skull in eight or nine hours.  At around $140 it was affordable but not cheap.  If what I read is true, I should be able to clean every head I get for the rest of my life, which spread that $140 out a bit.

I bought one.

When the Buck Boiler got there a week later I waited for the weekend to try it out.  Saturday came and I filled the bucket to the recommended level and plugged it in.  The instructions say to add dishwashing detergent by the teaspoon-full depending on conditions, and I did.

Even though the weather had been cool since I put it on the shelf, the head didn’t smell good and some big, fat maggots had been feasting on it when I took it down.  I shook out what I could and put the head in the bucket, checking it periodically.  Even though the instructions said it would take eight or nine hours to clean a skull, when I picked it up out of the water after four hours, it was done.  I figure the decay and hungry maggots made the difference.

——————————————

I carefully sprayed all remaining tissue off the skull with a garden hose and spray nozzle.

Noticing that some of my deer’s teeth had fallen out during boiling I dumped the bucket’s contents out on the concrete driveway leading to my machine shed.  The teeth were quickly located and I returned them to their sockets, then I put the clean skull on a plastic bucket in the machine shed to dry.

A couple days later I checked on the skull and found it dry and relatively grease-free.  The only problem was that some of the bones of the nose, as well as many of the teeth, were loose.  I used some non-foaming Gorilla Glue to permanently reattach things where they belonged, being careful to apply the adhesive where it wouldn’t show on the completed mount.  Just in case, I ran a bead of the glue along the base of all the teeth on the inside of the mouth.  Again, I did it so it wouldn’t show when complete.

The next day, when the glue had hardened completely, I used masking tape and shopping bags to cover the antlers entirely.  Then I held the skull up by the bag-covered antlers as I sprayed the skull with Kilz.  Kilz is a primer, sealer, and stain.  Annie and I have used it before when we’ve had to paint over a wall with stains on it and found that the product does a great job.  As the skull might still contain some traces of grease or body-oils that could bleed through regular paint, I thought Kilz could keep that from happening.

It has so far.  I’ve read that others have used it so I figure I’m safe.

Others who make their own European-mounts bleach the skulls.  I’ve done it to, but my experience has been that it is almost impossible not to bleach part of the antler burrs in the process.  I don’t like that, and the Kilz process is so easy I probably won’t go back to bleaching.

As you can see in the photo that accompanies this post, the result was a very nice European mount, and it was quick and easy to do.

——————————————

A few days before the Buck Boiler arrived, I pulled in my driveway after work, and saw that I had been absolutely right, one of my dogs had left Travis’s deer skull in the yard.  It was also in exactly the condition I expected it to be in.  The only part of the skull that remained was most of the brain case.  The dogs had gnawed the back of the skull off and had chewed away everything that could be considered part of the nose. 

I could have boiled it to remove the remaining skin and hair, but it was pointless.  What little skull that was still attached to the antlers would not have made an attractive skull, but I had a different idea.

I was familiar with a company named Mountain Mike’s that sells a plastic imitation skull that antlers can be attached to.  They sell for $30 and up, depending on species and how fancy you want it.  I bought the basic model.

It was amazing how simple the Mountain Mike’s skull was to use.  Travis and his family came to visit us around New Year’s Day.  John went with me to the machine shed to work on some projects I wanted to get done.   One of those tasks was to remove the antlers from Travis’s deer skull.

I tightened my vice to hold one antler, using cardboard to prevent marring of the antler, then used my reciprocating saw to cut the antlers off below the burr.  I could have used a hacksaw but the recip’ was quicker and handy.

I drilled holes up the base of the antlers, according to the instructions, then held them on the skull-cap included with the Mountain Mike’s kit, and screwed them on.  I couldn’t use the screws included with the kit because of the small size and shape of the antlers, but I found some shorter ones in my collection of salvaged parts.  Once the antlers were attached, I used some of my Gorilla Glue to fill the gap that remained between the burr and the artificial skull-cap’s pedicel. 

Included in the kit was some white gap-filler compound.  I’d used the glue because the screws I’d used hadn’t fit tightly and I didn’t want the antlers flopping around.  After the glue hardened, I used the included gap-filler.  It hid my poor handyman work just fine.

The final step was to attach the skullcap to the rest of the artificial skull using a couple small screws that came with the kit.

Done!

The completed project looks pretty good.  Don’t get me wrong, to anyone who looks close and knows about such things, the fact that the skull is artificial would be obvious, but it really is a pretty attractive substitute if the original skull is damaged beyond use, like Travis’s, or if you find some shed antlers you’d like to display.

——————————————

I hope my description of how I made these Euro-mounts will stand as examples of how you can do the same.  We will hang my creations in the cabin at Sweetwater where visitors can see them or they will be reminders for us of what wonderful family fun we’ve had there.

——————————————

PLEASE SUBSCRIBE AT THE UPPER RIGHT. IT’S FREE!

You will ONLY receive notifications when I post new entries to my blog.

Go to the top of the right hand column where it says, “SUBSCRIBE TO BLOG VIA EMAIL”.  Fill in your email and hit the “Subscribe” button.  You will receive a verification email.  Please confirm that you want to subscribe by clicking, “Confirm Follow” and you will be set!  Thanks!

It doesn’t seem to work from a cell phone, only a computer.  I don’t know why.  Sorry.  If there’s a problem, send me your email address and I’ll sign you up.

——————————————