So you want to stuff a badger

Sam Leith has been taking lessons in taxidermy, and he hasn’t had so much fun in ages

‘Now I’m going to show you what a scalpel handle is for,’ says Mike Gadd. I pick up the one nearest me, and start trying to affix the blade that I’ve so far been using pinched between finger and thumb. ‘Don’t be silly,’ says Mike. ‘It’s not for holding a scalpel blade.’ And with that, he reverses the scalpel handle in his own hand and digs its blunt, spatulate back end into the orbit of the eye in the skinned bird skull he’s holding. He whips it deftly round in a circle, and neatly pops out the eyeball. He turns the skull over and does the other.

I try it on my own bird. Very satisfying. Jays’ eyes come out dead easy. In death (as Mike demonstrated earlier by puffing one up with an injection of water) the eyes deflate like a tyre going down. Sitting on the workbench, mission accomplished, they look exactly, but exactly, like a pair of blueberries.

Three hours ago, I and the two other students on Mike’s three-day beginners’ course in bird taxidermy were each presented with a chilly, just-defrosted dead jay, feathers a little matted with blood, necks flopping around all over the shop. Now what I have on a piece of newspaper in front of me is …a mess. All my own work. I haven’t had so much fun in ages.

There’s more to stuffing a dead jay, however, than unseats the eye. ‘Where shall we start?’ Mike asked earlier, after issuing us with our feathery subjects. ‘Hmmn?’ I suggested bloodthirstily, running my forefinger in a line down the bird’s tum. ‘An incision?’ he said.