On Thursday at the museum I worked on preparing a Yellow-Shafted Northern Flicker, which is a species of woodpecker that has the most amazing sunflower-golden coloration on the inside of its wings and tail feathers (there is a Red-Shafted variation that lives in the western United States, and has scarlet coloration instead). The Flicker also had a red bar across the back of its neck and a constellation of wonderfully elegant black spots on its lower belly, which made me think of a pattern on a fine silk summer dress. It was an utterly gorgeous bird. I am always slightly surprised when Dave hands me a pretty bird to skin, as I generally feel that when I am done with them they cannot help but have lost at least some of their beauty.

I wish I could say that I did the Flicker justice, but I’ve had a two-week hiatus from the museum, and it showed. For one thing, I ripped the skin in several places as I was working it away from the body. Most of the time, this isn’t terribly devastating to the final result, since once you finish up and fluff the feathers on a bird into place (I lose far fewer feathers as I’m working now, which is a huge relief) small tears are not at all noticeable and don’t have to be repaired. But this time I managed to create a significant gash right near the bird’s right ulna, so that when I slid the wingbone back into place it popped out of the skin. I had to sew that tear up. I also had trouble securing the two ulnas together, which you do by simply knotting them together with a piece of thread that runs across the bird’s chest cavity. This keeps its wings close to its body as the bird dries, protecting them from damage and allowing the bird to be stored in a smaller space when it is unpinned. You have to work the skin right down to where the ulna meets the carpus (see the fourth picture on this page) and make the knot there; otherwise, the string doesn’t stay tight enough and the wings will fall open once the bird has been sewn up. This happened to my Flicker. I could see one of the other volunteers look over at it as she was leaving, and I cringed.

There’s no denying that I’m improving, though incrementally—there’s just such a mountain to climb. A good skin is perfect. No feather is out of place, the shape of the body is just right; you feel the bird could open its eyes and take wing.

My second bird that day was a Common House Sparrow, a dowdy brown thing, but I adore sparrows. I gave it all the delicacy I could muster, and it turned out reasonably well. Fluffy poof of a bird.

P.S. When I had worked the Flicker’s skull out of its skin, I noticed two extra bands of cartilage spanning each side of the head that you don’t see on other birds: extra shock-absorption for all the drilling it does. Walking back from the gym this morning, Ross and I heard—and then saw—two downy woodpeckers hammering away sonorously in the upper branches of a tree behind our apartment building. I thought of those bands of cartilage, cushioning their brains, and grinned.