A couple of completed coyote skulls

fratri

fratri

Active member
A couple of coyote skulls complete…
These skulls are from last season’s downed coyotes…..
Lots of ways to do them but this is how I do mine…
I remove the skull/head from the animal after it is skinned.
Place the skull/head in a bucket of water (I don’t even remove any flesh)
Place the bucket in a farmer’s field far away from any residence as the weather warms it is going to stink
Come late summer all the meat will have been eaten clean from bugs/bacteria
Remove the skull from the really smelly bucket of rotten water (where old garage clothes and long dish washing gloves as the stink will stick to clothes and skin)
Be careful to catch all the teeth as they will have fallen out

Place the skull/teeth and lower jaws (as they fell apart too) into a bucket of clean water with joy dish soap as this will help degrease and remove the terrible smell.
Leave them in the dish soap for a couple days (scrubbing them periodically with a tooth brush as this will remove any leftover debris and stink)

After a couple of days in the joy soap, dry off the skull, glue the lower jaw back together and start inserting the teeth back in. I usually just use white glue (that dries clear) to glue the jaw and teeth together.

Once all teeth are in and dry, I paint brush a light coat of Hydrogen Peroxide (20 volume I picked up at Shoppers)
I let put 3-4 coats of hydrogen peroxide allowing the previous coat to dry first (roughly 12 hrs intervals)
The more coats you put on the brighter/whiter they get. ( I think I got about 5 more to go…lol)




 
Dumb question do you have to keep adding water to the stink bucket while the skulls soak?? Or do you cover the buckets to keep the water from evaporating
 
You can do either.....if you cover the bucket (seal it) it will take longer for all the meat to be eaten away.... Keeping the bucket open to the elements allows the meat to be eaten and fall off the bone a lot quicker plus allow some rain water to top up the bucket. Depending on the amount of hot dry summer you have that will determine if the bucket needs a topping up or not...Even if all or most of the water evaporated, the bugs would still eat the meat but the skull will darken and may become brittle from the heat. (drying out)
Originally Posted By: BrownieDumb question do you have to keep adding water to the stink bucket while the skulls soak?? Or do you cover the buckets to keep the water from evaporating
 
Looks good.
I just had one finished by "Bugs"
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I'm going to definitely have to try this with some of my kills this fall and winter! I tried the method last winter of putting the skull in a crockpot on the warm setting, and just kept adding water. On that how to post, it said to leave it for 2 weeks, well, I should have paid much closer attention, because mine after 2 weeks was so brittle it basically crumbled into pieces! So I won't be trying that method again! I kept the canine teeth, and threw the rest in the garbage!

How long do you leave your skulls in the bucket before removing them?
 
Very cool. Now to figure out how to do that and still get the bounty here in Utah. The lower jaw will be missing a tooth though.
 
Those came out nice. Seems like a lot of work, though. I prefer the beetle cleaning method. A well prepped coyote skull will take about 6-8 hours to get beetle cleaned down to the bone. The bone quality remains perfect and the teeth don't fall out.

I've been doing it for 15 years and it definitely makes for some nice trophies.
 
JW did mine, he no longer does skulls. He would heat tank of water to 90 degrees, add a shovel of dirt for bacteria, 2 weeks, then peroxide- magnezium? mix to whiten skull after heating it in water-simple green mixture to remove the oil, brush dry peroxide mixture off, re assemble jaws and teeth, he used to do a lot of elk, moose, deer, antelope, he did my mule deer
 
I did my first skull last year, it was a marmot. I put it in the garden under a tomato plant all summer. By harvest in the fall most of the flesh was gone, the brain however was still in the skull. I simmered the skull on the oven in some dawn dish soap until brain matter stopped coming out. Then I soaked it in dish water for a couple weeks to degrease. Next I soaked it in regular peroxide from walmart for another week or so. Last I coated it in elmers glue diluted 50/50 with water. Turned out great!

Last years coyote skull is under a bell pepper plant as we speak!
 
Originally Posted By: jhartwig24I'm going to definitely have to try this with some of my kills this fall and winter! I tried the method last winter of putting the skull in a crockpot on the warm setting, and just kept adding water. On that how to post, it said to leave it for 2 weeks, well, I should have paid much closer attention, because mine after 2 weeks was so brittle it basically crumbled into pieces! So I won't be trying that method again! I kept the canine teeth, and threw the rest in the garbage!

How long do you leave your skulls in the bucket before removing them?
Up here in Ontario Canada I need to leave them in for most of the summer before everything is eaten... I place them in the bucket when taken (in winter) it will freeze and thaw in the spring so by late July its all cleaned up.... This way is really easy, nature does it all but it just takes a bit of time....so if you are in no hurry this is the way to go...
 
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