Merriam's Turkey Rug

     Just completed stretching and drying the skin from the tom I shot this spring season.

I wanted to try and do something a little different than in past seasons. I usually end up tossing the skin and always hated seeing all those beautiful feathers go to waste. I'd always save a few feathers for tying flies or give them to anyone that wanted them. Since you can only fan so many tails and mounting can get pretty expensive, I was hoping for another option. I remembered seeing a photo of an interesting turkey mount in one of the outdoor magazines I subscribe to. So I began my search for the article but for the life of me I couldn't find it. I googled it but since I didn't recall what it was called, I found very little information on it, only that it is normally called a turkey rug. I then found many sites on Turkish Rugs! I took the information I could find for the "turkey rug" and decided to try and duplicate what I had seen.

     It basically required very carefully skinning the bird (the thin skin tears/cuts very easily) out and then removing ALL meat, fat and some wing bones from the skin and then stretching the skin, feather side down, then pinning it all to a sheet of plywood, cardboard or styrofoam. Pinning the wings and fanning the tail as you normally would to whatever shape you wanted it and then spread Powdered Borax on all the exposed areas of the skin and let it dry.

     After about 3 weeks in a heated workshop I vacuumed all the Borax from it, unpinned it, flipped it over, blew it off a little and this is how it turned out. It has kept its' shape reasonably well, maybe keeping it pinned another week or too would be better tho, but my impatience to see how it turned out got the best of me. I did pin it back down and trimmed it a little bit to the shape I was looking for.
    
     After that, you can then just hang it on a wall or mount it to piece of felt or build a shadow box to mount it in and then find a place to hang it. I like the shadow box with a glass cover idea for me to keep the dust etc. off of it. It requires about a 4'x4' box and about a 3"to 4" depth. I found on the internet that there are some taxidermists that will do these, they run about $400-$600 without a display box. This one cost me about $4.00 for a box of Powdered Borax, probably enough to do 3-4 rugs, and my time, maybe 3-4 hours. And I enjoyed doing it!

    Well I hope you enjoy this idea as another option to preserve that memory of your spring turkey hunt. Thanks for checking it out! Hope you can get out to enjoy the out of doors this weekend! Take care!
Rich