Trophy Bones
Taxidermist Pat Bannon employs thousands of workers in the part-time business he operates out of his home in Deer Lodge, Mont.
The helpers get free room and board, and they’re encouraged to eat their fill of meat and leave the bones.
Bannon uses colonies of dermestid beetles that strip the flesh off skulls to produce the striking European-style trophy mounts favored by many sportsmen.
The beetles aren’t discriminating eaters. They’ll feast on the meat of a rodent as readily as that of a trophy bull elk, making their labor as valuable to educators, naturalists and museum curators as it is to hunters.
One of the most striking mounts on Bannon’s Skull Taxidermy Web site involves the dark beak contrasting with the sparkling white beetle-cleaned skull of a sandhill crane.
Some turkey hunters steep in the lore of the sport by making traditional wing-bone calls. The meat must be removed from the bones and they must be separated, cut and reassembled. With practice, virtually every turkey call except the gobble can be imitated with the wing bones.
The beetles, also known as carpet beetles, are a cheap workforce. A fine trophy deer skull cleaned, whitened and mounted on an oak panel costs $135 – roughly a third the cost of a traditional caped head and shoulder mount.
The basic price for stripping a rodent skull is $30. On the top end, a moose skull mounted on fine cherrywood is priced at $210.
Bannon, a teacher, started cleaning skulls with beetles as a hobby before “going pro” and opening a business 12 years ago.
“Doing an elk by hand might take me eight to 12 hours of cleaning and scraping,” he said. “Even with the beetles, I still have to prepare the skull. But I’ve done hundreds of them and it takes me about 45 minutes to skin and remove the eyes and brain and lower jaw. Then I put the skull in with the beetles and they finish it up in one or two days.”
Do-it-yourselfers know that preparing a skull can take many hours and an amateur with a knife can leave cuts and scrapes in the bone.
The traditional method of preparing a European mount at home involves boiling the skull until much of the meat falls off. While cooking, however, the melted fat soaks into the bone and produces greasy yellow skulls.
Using beetles eliminates this problem.
“I’d heard about the beetles for years, after all there are other businesses that do it,” Bannon said. “A friend at the University of Montana had a colony and gave me a handful of beetles to get started. It takes two or three months to establish a really good colony.”
During and after the hunting seasons, Bannon’s beetles eat well by cleaning up the skulls from his growing business. In summer, he still has to feed the work force.
“We living in a ranching community and everybody knows I do this,” he said. “When they loose a cow for some reason, some ranchers give me a call and I’ll go and cut off the hind quarters or some thing and put them in the freezer. The beetles live through the off-season eating really good beef. Not bad.”
The beetles must be kept warm, but the biggest concern is keeping other bugs and pests out of the colony, he said.
“Every bug in the neighborhood wants to get in with the beetles and their meals because is smells so good in there. But the other bugs will introduce parasites. I’ve been wiped out before. That’s why I always have beetles in at least two different locations.”
Larvae ranging from .06 to .75 inches long get into every crook and cranny of a skull to leave it remarkably clean, but they don’t do a complete job.
“We still have to get some grease out of the bones, and some species are greasier than others,” he said. “Bears are very greasy while mountain lions are not.
“We soak the skull in solvents or simmer them in a mild detergent or put them in an enzyme bath that lets microorganisms eat the fat. The skulls come out grease free. Then we chemically whiten the skulls with hydrogen peroxide paste.”
The bones of young animals are delicate. Even the skull of a yearling bear or deer will not be hardened or completely grown together, he said.
Hunters choose the European skull mount for different reasons. First, it’s attractive, and in many cases sportsmen go this route simply because they don’t have room in their homes to display the traditional shoulder mount.
“You have an elk with the front shoulders, neck, head and antlers and it takes up way too much space for most homes,” Bannon said. “And this is a lot more economical. Today’s hunters are pretty successful and they have multiple trophies. Many of them want something more than just mounting the antlers on a board and sticking it on the wall.
Some customers enhance their mounts by having Bannon coat the skulls with a cold-spray metal finish of bronze, nickel or copper.
“People mail us skulls from all over,” he said. “They simply have to be wrapped well in leak-proof plastic, boxed and sent overnight delivery.”