Chapter 2434: Sonia (XI)

Fortunately, this interval wouldn't be wasted—it could be used to continue repairing the marlin specimen. But before that, she still had natural history knowledge to impart.

She deftly opened the fully-skinned bird body and extracted the stomach and crop.

A powerful stench filled the room. Even masks couldn't block it, and the apprentices frowned and covered their noses.

"Very smelly, isn't it?" Sonia said. "When making specimens, if conditions permit, we should always dissect the stomach, crop, cheek pouches, and other food storage organs. This reveals what the animal's main food sources are—valuable information for understanding its habits and habitat."

She carefully cut open the crop and poured out a pile of blackish food fragments. The contents were still relatively intact, showing both insects and plant seeds.

"Everyone take a look—can you identify roughly what kinds of seeds and insects are present?" Sonia used small tweezers to separate the food fragments.

Then she cut open the stomach pouch as well. The intense rotting stench sent apprentices who had approached stepping back again. Sonia acted as though she smelled nothing, spreading the contents on the enamel dish.

The stomach's contents had become semi-paste, and most were unrecognizable. But after spreading them out and looking carefully, some undigested food fragments remained visible.

"Everyone look—how many kinds of insects and plants can you identify?"

The apprentices gathered around the two enamel basins, doing their best to endure the foul odor while carefully examining the contents.

"There are beetles, but I can't tell what kind."

"Correct." Sonia nodded, separating out the beetle remains.

"Snail!"

"That one's too easy—the snail shell is completely intact." Sonia laughed.

"Cricket."

"You identified that from its leg, right?"

The apprentices chattered away, identifying quite a few insect types, but no one could identify the plants. Understandably, these seeds—even undigested—showed a semi-decayed state with significant changes to color and shape, making them difficult to recognize. Sonia herself couldn't identify many either.

If she could borrow her master's microscope, she should be able to distinguish more details. But the optical factory's microscopes remained in short supply. "Non-productive departments" like the Natural History Museum had to wait in long queues even after submitting purchase requests. The one in Sonia's research room was something Lin Hanlong had obtained through connections as a "birthday gift."

But Sonia didn't intend to bring this reeking pile of contents back to her research room—she had too many things on her plate and couldn't spare time to research blue magpies.

"This looks like animal limbs." Valentina suddenly spoke up. She used tweezers to extract a small bone-like object.

"It is indeed animal bone," Sonia confirmed after examining it. "Probably part of a limb bone from some amphibian or reptile. I can't specifically identify which for now. But based on the food preferences of other corvid birds, it should be lizard or frog."

"So they eat a very varied diet."

"Correct. Corvid birds are extremely omnivorous. Though they mainly consume animal foods like insects, they also eat plant fruits, seeds, and grains. Common animal prey includes click beetles, scarab beetles, locusts, grasshoppers, flies, katydids, crickets, beetles, lepidopteran larvae, and other insects. They also eat spiders, snails, worms, fireflies, frogs, lizards, nestlings, bird eggs, and other small invertebrates and vertebrates."

Sonia recited information from Ornithology with ease. Of course, she wasn't merely repeating what she'd read—she had dissected quite a few corvid birds and verified these observations through experiments. Blue magpies, being corvids, shouldn't differ much.

Finally, by identifying food fragments and residue, they calculated the diet composition: plant fruits at 33.8%, amphibians and reptiles at 32.4%, insects at 22.5%, other small birds at 7%, and unidentifiable material at 4.3%.

After describing the blue magpie's diet, the marlin's moistening time had elapsed. Sonia had them bring the specimen back. The wet cloth had already been removed earlier, allowing the surface moisture to partially air-dry.

Xiaowen brought Sonia's toolbox. Sonia felt the fish skin at various points and judged it sufficiently softened. "When repairing specimens, we first restore them to their original state. Broken places need patching; sunken places need re-stuffing—if the stuffing shows signs of mold or insects, old stuffing must be removed and replaced."

She then began repairs. Repairing specimens was painstaking work. She first adjusted the internal support structure according to the damage, then sprinkled camphor powder on degreased kapok to stuff broken and sunken areas. Next, she pinned the edges of cracked skin with small nails—a particularly difficult step because the softened skin would gradually lose moisture again, requiring many damaged places to be temporarily clamped with special boards for shaping.

Where skin was missing and couldn't be nailed or sewn, Sonia had no choice but to use special paper-skin patches.

"Whenever possible, avoid patching," Sonia explained. "Whether leather or paper, its strength differs from fish skin—shrinkage rates vary when wet or dry, and breaks occur easily."

"If we had marlin skin, wouldn't that work?" one apprentice suggested. "Same marlin skin, same shrinkage rate."

"You're right, but we don't have any," Sonia agreed.

"My family's master works at the fishing company. We could ask him to save the fish skins..."

"The way you put it, it'd be simpler to just catch a new marlin."

"Besides, the fishing company doesn't skin fish anyway—that's the seafood processing plant's job."

...

Sonia gestured for everyone to stop discussing. During the interval while the skin dried, she would start making the Taiwan blue magpie.

She put on gloves and carefully removed a glass bottle bearing a black skull.

"This is preservative paste—a highly toxic preservative that we commonly use when making specimens. Its active ingredient in Chinese is called arsenic. It's actually an arsenic-containing compound. Extremely poisonous! If you accidentally get it on your lips, you'll be meeting God in less than a minute."

She opened the lid and carefully scooped out some paste with a bamboo scraper. A strange odor spread through the air.

Sonia spread out the bird skin and carefully applied the preservative paste to its inner surface. Then she hung it up to air briefly before beginning the making process.

"The second important step in making taxidermy specimens is constructing the support frame. The frame material is this galvanized iron wire—soft enough yet with sufficient strength." Sonia picked up a bundle of Australian galvanized iron wire. "This is Australian wire—galvanized for corrosion resistance, especially useful for our specimen work."

She explained that wire selection should be based on bird size to determine the appropriate gauge. Generally, it should be able to support the entire bird specimen. Wire too thin can't support the bird's body and makes shaping difficult. Wire too thick makes frame building, threading, and shaping laborious.

"Small birds use 26 to 24 gauge wire; large birds use 8 to 10 gauge. The commonly used range is 20 to 10 gauge. For blue magpies, being larger small birds, we can use 20 gauge."

Sonia extracted a roll of wire and needle-nose pliers from the bundle. These Australian tools—she genuinely found them easy to use.

"First we build the support frame. Before building, we need a basic plan: what posture will the specimen have? For birds, there are two basic poses: standing and flying. If subdivided, there are more. The specific pose can reference natural history illustrations, or be decided based on the stripped skin's condition. Today, we'll do the simplest standing pose."

She picked up the wire, measured dimensions, then cut three pieces. She used a file to smooth both ends of each wire piece.

"The cut wire ends will be rather sharp—file them first to avoid piercing the leather when threading—and possibly piercing your hand too." She picked up one wire:

"Frame building generally uses three wires. The first goes from head to left foot. At this point, the specimen's belly faces up"—she gestured with the bird skin—"The wire should extend 3-4 centimeters beyond the beak and exceed the foot by 5-6 centimeters." She began threading the wire through the leather. "Movements must be gentle—don't use force. Otherwise, the skin tears easily."

After threading the first wire, the second was done the same way—from left wing to right foot. The third wire went from right wing to tail.

"This wire should extend 5-6 centimeters beyond the tail bone. Species with especially long tail feathers—like this Taiwan blue magpie—the tail wire should be made into a 'Y' shape."

Sonia threaded all three wires, carefully held the middle of all three in her hand, and gently straightened both wings and both feet to make both sides symmetrical. Then she bent the wires from the middle. Dawen quickly handed her a short wire to tie tight from the middle, then separated and arranged them.

Though not yet stuffed, the skin and feathers supported by the wires "hung" on the frame in a grotesque form. But one could already discern this was a bird.

"The frame is now complete. Next is stuffing," Sonia said. "After the frame is threaded, stuffing must proceed quickly—we can't wait for the feathers to completely dry. Right now the bird's feathers are still slightly damp. If they dry completely, they become very difficult to groom into shape."

For stuffing specimens, Fangcaodi used to use rice straw for animal specimens. The results were poor—rice straw easily corroded, attracted insects, and molded. It also easily damaged the leather, and stuffing fullness and stability were inadequate. So they had switched to degreased kapok.

(End of Chapter)