MY FIRST TIME.
This was the very first bird I ever prepared a study skin of.
A very fat juvenile male Laysan Duck (Anas laysanensis), at the Bernice P. Bishop Museum in Honolulu (Kalihi), O’ahu, Hawai’i.
When the collections manager told me that was my bird, I thought she was joking. Giving me an extremely difficult large bird as my first? Oh yea, and those babies are endangered. Was she nuts?!
But (albeit after eight hours) it came out just fine, despite a few holes from scraping the fat and oils out. Feathers are always the perfect disguise for blunders!
I’m so glad to have found my niche with the “Dragon Ladies.”
(Click through for the Bishop Museum Vertebrate Zoology Collections.)
