Tutorial cleaning bones PART 1

So you have a raw skull or bone.  This means the bone or skull still has flesh/meat on it.  There are several ways to get it clean.  Some of which I may forget to mention even.

STEP 1: getting the bones free of flesh

Choices: water, bugs, range cleaning, and sweating

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MACERATION or SIMMERING-

Macerating means soaking them in water.  Put the raw bones in warm water, you can use the summer sun, a heat lamp, a fish tank heater, etc. to keep the water warm.  Change half the water every 3 to 5 days until no more flesh and meat is attached.  I've also had luck in not changing the water at all.  You want to keep some bacteria and give them room to keep multiplying.    You do NOT need to add any other cleaner to this mixture, the bacteria of rotting meat and guts is enough.

Some are tough and may take longer.  The first animal I did took 4 days of range cleaning and 4 days of maceration to strip of flesh.  The first goose and pheasant and chicken I did took a month or so.  One mummified cat I did took about a month just to
loosen the hard flesh.

If macerating several skulls it would help to put them in baggies inside the same bucket, so you can keep the many teeth separate (teeth usually fall out of the skull during macerating) to their own skull.

Skinning and gutting before macerating helps keep the smell down, but it also takes longer for it to work.  All the bacteria in the gut help breed bacteria during macerating.  The animals that I have done whole (fur, feathers, guts, everything) had a much shorter macerating period than the animals that I stripped.  I am thinking of reaching a happy medium next time- skin it and deflesh most of it, but throw the guts and organ in the bucket with the bones.  We will see how this goes summer 2010.


Simmering means just that- a soft simmer, not a boil.  The hotter the water, the faster it will strip the bones of flesh but you should never boil the bones as this weakens them.  
Simmering is fine.  Keep an eye on them and pull out all the bones as they become clean of flesh.  You should note that many people will tell you that simmering will make degreasing (the next step) that much harder as the extreme heat from simmering can "cook" the grease right into the skull.

A note on boiling- boiling will weaken the bone and cook the grease right into the bone according to many opinions on taxidermy.net.  Boiling is ill advised!  I have also heard of people boiling with bleach.  Never ever use bleach as bleach will decalcify bone (weaken it) and within months it will be chalky and falling apart.



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BUGS-

some collectors use flesh eating bugs called demestid beetles, and keep colonies in their homes.  For skulls that are broken or weak this method is gentle and easier than soaking in water for a few reasons: water gets in cracks and takes them apart, but with beetles if you watch the bugs carefully you can pull the skull out before these breaks in the skull are lodged open by them.

I hear these bugs are easy to care for but you should still put in some research before deciding.  Sure, they eat flesh but do they eat the organs and guts?  Do they eat wet flesh or dry jerkied flesh?  The answers are they do not like much moisture and dried.  Do they need light or darkness?  They prefer the dark.  These are the type of questions you will need to get answered if you decide to try these lovely bugs out.

I have never tried bugs in captivity myself, but I have done a lot of reading on them from taxidermy.net.


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RANGE CLEANING-

This is the simplest form of Step 1 if you have the means to do it.  You just put the corpse outside for rodents and bugs (flies, maggots, dermestids, other beetles, spiders... ANY bug that wants a piece of your corpse) to eat the flesh off of.  If you're lucky you will also have wild dermestids pay you a visit.  The ideal invitation for some wild dermestids is an opaque bucket or tub, that way it will be nice and dark under there.

I lay the body, usually skinned and gutted but also sometimes whole, on the ground and then place a bucket or tub over it with some bricks on top of the bucket.  Then I check on it every few days.  



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SWEATING-

This method I discovered by accident during the late winter/early spring of 2010 when I put 5 coyotes outside under black trash bags.  I thought the trash bags would just contain them and the smell for a short time until I had time to start cutting them up for maceration.  By the time I did get out to them I found that they were moist and pliable and the fur was falling right out.  I expected them to be hard and the fur stuck.

What happened was the dark bags invited beetles.  The warmth from the black bags attracted early flies.  The moisture from recent rain and snow plus the heat from the black bags bred heated moisture.  So they were already swarming with maggots and had
been decaying for a few months thanks to this method.  Hacking them into pieces and stripping them of that pesky fur that gets in the way during maceration was therefore a piece of cake by early spring.

Sweating is also used when you have a horned animal like a goat and you have to get the horn sheath off before cleaning it.  If you leave the horn sheaths on they are just that much harder to clean.




NEXT: DEGREASING THE BONES