Tanning a Nutria - Part 2

If you haven't read Part 1 of this series, you can read it here. Sunday night I finished the Nutria tanning project I started at the end of November. At the end of Part 1 I set the racked nutria by the wood stove to dry. Over the course of a few nights there, it dried out. One weekend my friend Andrew and I decided to work on our hides together. He obtained an animal from the same source. His was much larger than mine as you'll see in the picture below.

I used the same metal scraper my brother and I used on the bison. It was pretty easy except the details of head. Half of the time was spent carefully scraping around the ears, eyes, nose and lips.


Andrew did an open skinning and used obsidian to scrape. He tanned it and laid it out in the sun and then never saw it again. I guess someone walking by took it.


Saturday I began the long process of tanning. I used a mixture of soap, oil and water. I rubbed it in till it started getting soft. Then I poured on more mixture and folded the trash bag over top and let it saturate for several hours. When I came back it was fully saturated and flexible.


I started a fire in the wood stove to warm the air. I popped in the new Wolverine movie and settled in for many hours of stretching and drying the hide. I wrung out as much moisture as I could. Then I pulled it back and forth over a rounded post stretching all parts of the hide. Wolverine ended. I put in Watchmen and continued. The skin changed from blue to white meaning it was getting drier. Two and half hours later when Watchmen was winding down, the hide was basically dry but still felt a little cool to the touch. I continued to work the hide as I watched The Ladies Man although it was basically done at that point. The next morning the belly was soft and flexible as can be. The back was just the slightest bit stiff. Overall I was very pleased. I think the lesson was to wring it out more and towel off the fur side before stretching.

The next day I buffed the hide with a pumice stone to soften it up and get rid of skin fragments. In the picture below the right side has been buffed.


Sunday night I got out my smoker. I used to have a pail to contain the fire and support the top pail. Without that I had to rig up this monstrosity of wood and stone to support the top pail and funnel the smoke up. The efficiency of this device was pretty pathetic. 75% of the smoke probably never reached the hide. It might be hard to tell in the picture but there was a skirt of denim sewn onto the hide and connected to the duct. Using the duct prevented the flame and heat from scorching the hide.


Here you can see that the smoke was definitely reaching the hide through the duct. I later clothes-pinned the arms and mouth shut to keep the smoke inside longer. To get smoke I built up a bed of coals and then added wet wood and live evergreen branches. I had to constantly monitor it to keep it from flaming up or burning out. After an hour and a half I took it down.


The picture below shows the finished product. The picture quality isn't that great so it's hard to tell the difference between this and the pre-buffed picture earlier. But the color is definitely darker.


I'm very happy with the finished hide. The hair stayed on and it's soft and flexible enough to make a puppet out of. There were some holes to sew up and I lost the eyelashes, but other than that it's pretty nice. The only thing left to do is make something with it. Most likely I'll sew the bottom together to make some type of bag. I'll post pictures if/when I do that.

The Chickens Are All Grows Up

I thought I would give an update on my chickens since a lot has changed in 3 months. I spent many hours patching up all the holes in the fence to keep the dog inside. Over the course of a month, it was a battle between us. He found rotted pieces of fence or low places he could jump over. He even broke out going under the house and knocking a downspout down in the process. I thought I finally had him until he decided to jump the porch fence despite the 5 foot dropl. In the end a plastic coated wire leash was the solution. Now he spends his days on the front porch where he wants to be.

I tell you this because in my failed quest to contain the dog in the backyard, I succeeded in keeping him out and the chickens in. I was finally able to let them free range. I simply open the door in the morning and close it at night. In the picture below, you can see how different the run is compared to the lawn. The run used to be as green. The lawn has since been scratched up in many places but is mostly still green. I really think the chickens are much happier now.



This picture taken a couple weeks ago shows how much bigger and healthier they are now. The reddish colored ones which I now believe to be the Sex-links breed look a lot better. Some of them had been missing a lot of feathers.



As I mentioned in my last chicken post the screen I put over my droppings pits didn't allow the droppings to fall through. I swapped it out for some plastic coated chicken wire. Despite the larger holes it is still pretty sturdy for the chickens to walk on and allows the poo to drop through. I can get away with cleaning it every two weeks though one week is better.



At some point in the late fall my chickens stopped laying eggs. I really didn't understand what the deal was. I actually had to buy a dozen eggs at the store. Then I read that egg laying is related to sunlight and that a light in the coop would help. I installed a 60 watt bulb on a timer to give the chickens solid light from 5am to 7pm. After a few days, they started laying again.

In December we had a week of temperatures in the teens. I felt pretty bad for the hens. I put towels over the openings under the roof and the door to prevent drafts and keep the body heat in. At night I put coals from my wood stove in between two metal pans and put them in the coop to add some heat. The water froze every day so I put out a pan every morning. I'm glad the birds were all bigger and fully feathered. They made it through the week with now problem.

Over the course of the last month the egg production has steadily increased. I started noticing some really small eggs mixed in with the normal eggs. I figured out that the small ones were the first eggs of one of the hens. As of this week I'm up to 6-7 eggs a day including the small ones. I expect over the course of the next month the tiny eggs will be replaced by normal sized ones. Below is a picture of the spectrum of egg sizes, shapes and colors they are laying right now. They range from "just bigger than a quarter" to "can't close the carton, jumbo sized".



While the one on the left is pretty darn small, the one on the right is dog gone big too!


The next big project that I'm working on is hooking up rain barrels to harvest rainfall from my roof. As part of that project I plan to hook up a new chicken water dish that will be fed from the rain barrels. If it works like I plan, watering the chickens will be one less task for me to worry about.

Tanning a Nutria - Part 1

My brother came over today and brought me a gift. A dead nutria. I've wanted to tan one for awhile. My first introduction to the nutria was when my SCA crew bought a tanned hide and sewed it into a pouch as a gift for our crew leader. She loves soft, cuddly animals.

Since moving to the Portland area, I've been able to see them alive in the wild. There are at least three that I see from time to time at work. I've often mentally hunted and trapped them. They are pretty trusting around humans. The Trackers Northwest group sometimes teaches classes where they trap Nutria so I've seen hides in the tanning process. In fact, I'm told this Nutria came by way of TrackersNW.

I laid it out on the stainless steel table my brother and I bought a year ago with butchering animals in mind. No worries with blood and guts soaking into wood. It also is a high table so it's comfortable to stand around when working. It's worked for bison, deer and now nutria. I digress.

The body wasn't stiff so that made it easy to work with. The smell was only mild. Not bad.


With the bison we cut a line down the center of the belly, cuffed the legs and the neck. With the nutria I "case" skinned it instead. I still cuffed the legs, but the only other cut was around the anus (and later the tail) and connecting that to the back leg cuffs as seen in the picture below. I used two flakes of obsidian for all the cutting. One flake is at the bottom right corner of the picture.


Once I got started it was relatively easy to pull the skin over the animal until I got to the head. The head took a lot of time because of the eyes, ears and mouth. The plan is to tan the full hide including the head. In the picture below you can see the skin rolled right over the animal and is hanging on only by the tail. I ended up cutting the tail skin off completely because it didn't want to come off the body.


The last step was to fashion a stretching board. I used an old shelf and shaped it to fit the animal. Now I will let it dry out. The next step after drying will be to scrape all the meat, skin and other parts off. Sitting by the wood stove this guy should dry out faster than the bison.


I decided that I wasn't going to eat the meat because I didn't know how long it had been dead and exactly where it came from. My brother wanted to keep the bones though so I did get some practice gutting. It was a piece of cake compared to a bison.

Read Part 2 here.

Cauliflower Mushroom

Sunday I took a walk in the woods to find a spear shaft. It was one of those slow walks where I walked at the pace of nature stopping to identify trees with my field guide. In an hour's time I covered probably only half a mile. I was looking for young maple trees of a diameter suitable for a spear shaft, but had no luck. I got to know that area of the woods a lot better though.

As I approached a creek crossing I spotted this beautiful cauliflower mushroom below. It was growing at the base of a very large cedar stump.


I cut it from the ground leaving much of the root in place. Hopefully the mushroom will be back next year or the year after. When I got it home it weighted in at 6 lbs. One field guide I read said they grow up to 30 inches wide and 40 lbs.



I am a complete beginner when it comes to harvesting wild mushrooms so I'm pretty nervous about eating them. This one however is pretty easy to identify and is considered one of the best to eat. Tonight I tried a small portion fried up in butter. It was pretty good. My plan is to eat a little more each time to make sure my body is OK with it. In conclusion, free wild food is awesome!

The Chickens Have Arrived

I finally got my chickens yesterday. I picked up 8 young hens from a person I contacted via craigslist. They were $12 each which is the best deal I found. Most ads I saw priced them at $15-20. Before I get ahead of myself, let's talk about the run.

I wanted at least part of the run to be tall enough for me to walk around in so I decided to build a ~6 ft tall door. I sunk two posts I found and then built a door with some 2x4s I bought.



Next I pounded in metal posts I found. They were various heights so it was interesting to figure out the best arrangement for them. Basically the height of the run got shorter the further from the door. There were even a few really short ones that I used to support a metal roof piece I found. This will provide some shade and shelter from the rain.



I added a few more 2x4s on top of the door posts and to the first set of metal posts to make the run a little more solid. I ran the chicken wire out 6-12 inches on the ground and laid rocks on top to prevent the dog from digging under and murdering the ladies. I may try to make this a little more presentable in the future. I'm thinking about putting soil on top and planting something the chickens will eat.



The extra height allowed me to add in some roosts at various heights and a rope swing. I'm hoping these things will keep them entertained. I haven't seen them use them yet though. I also noticed tonight that at least some of them weren't using the roosts in the coop so maybe they just don't want to roost.



Here are the chickens minutes after arriving. They immediately went for the feed and then a dust bath. Also notice Ace casing the joint.



The chickens scratching and bathing. I believe I have 5 Rhode Island Reds and 3 Buff Orpingtons. I made my own feeder and waterer to save money. I think they will last awhile without need of a refill. In the future I would like to hook up a rain catchment system to supply the water.


I think these are Buff Orpingtons, "Buff" being their color.



When I woke up this morning there was one egg in the nesting box. After work there were three more. You can see that they are different sizes, shapes and colors. I think these chickens are 5-6 months old and are just starting to lay. Some may not be laying yet. I ate the eggs tonight and they were tasty. The yolks were very dark yellow.



The only issue so far is that it looks like I underestimated the size of chicken poo. The poo isn't falling through the screen on my droppings boxes. I think I will buy a screen with a larger mesh size. Otherwise it defeats the purpose.

BONUS PIC - I noticed this kind creature praying for my chickens. I haven't seen one of these guys since I was a kid. Good vibes!