Preserving deer hair

Hunting season is fast approaching, and as it turns out my supply of deer fur is starting to get low. Anyone have experience preserving your own fur? Is it just as simple as hanging a patch of skin out to dry?

I remove as much flesh from the patch as possible then put in Ziploc bag with enough salt to completely cover everything. The salt will draw out the moisture. After a few days change out moist salt with more dry salt. Do this until salt stays dry then your good to go. I also do this with tails that still have the bone inside. Squirrel,ringtails foxes and the like

What gar said. I do try and get the bone out of tails though.


gar1970 how in the heck do you stand being around a ringtail to even cut his tai off? The last one I killed years ago made skunk smell pretty.

I tried stripping the bone out of the tail before but found that the fur falls off too easy.


ringtails are in the skunk family and do smell rank but the ones i have taken were not too bad. Maybe the one you got was old or had just come from the gym

The crappie don't mind in fact they love my ringtail jig

I have one that visits the back yard now. Wish I wasn't in a neighborhood, he wouldn't make it. Had never seen them this far north and east till we moved back here. The smell is what I found odd as they are not in the weasel family like skunks but belong to the same family as coons, coatis, and kinkajous yet they have a scent gland like a weasel and God help you if you pop it skinning one. They only use this gland when scarred and not for marking like a weasel. The build turd piles for marking, that's how I found my little nocturnal visitor here a mountain of little brown Easter eggs in the corner of the yard. I've only seen him twice though coming down the power line. They say folks here in Texas and further west used to keep them as pets but can't imagine the smelly critter in my house. Hope the dogs never get into it with the one in the yard.

Forgot to mention when I pull bone out I try and lay the hide flat and use boric acid powder.

Bones, you sir are a wealth of information. I always seem to learn something new when you post. Thank you

I do remove the bone on bucktails and larger animals as they have so much meat and fat it would take too much salt and time to dry out.
This is a wildebeest tail I'm removing the bone from
This is a wildebeest jig made from that tail

That is one cool looking jig. I need to start tying some of that kind of stuff. Mass quantities of crappie and white bass will be coming up in the spring. If everything rings true as it did when I was here before March 6th is the magic date.

Wildebeest, holy cow; when do you find time to slip out to Africa? Or do you have wildebeest on your ranch? About as exotic as I have used is some tail from one my of Irish Dexter cows.



Just a few of the happy donors.

Thanks for the compliment on the jig. It works awesome but it seems the bass always hit it before the crappie do
I don't have wildebeest on the ranch. Thank God! I only raise whitetail axis and red stag. My son works at a meat market and saves me any kind of exotic fur that comes thru that the hunters dont want.
You have a good looking herd! I wouldn't mind some of #11s curls from between it's horns

#11 and Curly, the one begging cattle cookies in the first picture, are the only ones that are actually mine the rest are my buddy's. He runs them up in Colorado, I just get a dividend check when the calfs get sold. They were my paycheck for working for a friend of ours during wheat and corn harvest and building about twenty miles of fence two years ago. We started with the little dexters because they are the smallest standard breed and don't need much pasture or chow in the winter. They are also a triple purpose bovine, you can beef them, milk em or turn them into oxen. Their tail gets really long hair over the summer and is awesome for streamers. Winter time it gets short and super course. My buddy has one that is cross with a Hereford, mainly because a neighbor didn't build fence to good, that one would makes some awesome tying material she looks like she is crossed with teddy bear.

COFF , didn't mean to hi-jack your thread and i hope your question was answered

Yeh back to that. Salt works really well on bone in; boric acid does really good on bone out and in my opinion leaves the hide a little more supple so you can get a better cut of hair.

Oh one more thing when you cut your patch, make sure to cut from the flesh side pushing your knife out twards the hair side. That way you only cut the hide leaving the hair intact