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.