European Mounts

For years now, I have been sawing off the skull cap of bucks and mounting these to display boards, and calling it quits. Of course, I have to boil them first, but the whole process is rather fast and easy. I can have the antlers ready to mount almost immediately. A while back, I decided that I would try a European full-skull mount and see how it compared.

Moose and Angus discovered a seriously decomposing buck down in the creek at the bottom of Hootin’ Holler back in 2018. They waited until the dead of winter and then returned with proper tools, dug the head out of the ice and then chopped it off. The stench was enough to knock a buzzard off a honey wagon, so they just tied a rope to the antlers and chucked it in the pond. They returned the next summer, pulled it out, and hosed it off. The result was a fairly clean skull, but it had been stained an orange/brown due to the submersion in pond muck.

The next year, at Moose’s insistence, I tried the same trick. I heaved my head into the pond in November, tied to paracord, and pulled it out the next June. Mine, like his, was stained, but not unpleasantly so.

Last fall, I nailed a really nice buck– best I’ve taken in a decade. In the meantime, I’d been reading up on European Mounts. I had a decent candidate and went for it. It spent a couple of weeks rolling around the back of my truck in a corrugated box before I got home from deer hunting. It was getting a bit gamey. I dug a hole in the backyard, chucked the head in, and buried it, leaving the antlers out, clear down to the pedicle. I then inverted a garbage can over the antlers and put a concrete block on top to discourage the critters from messing with it. I had meant to pull it out by Memorial Day, but I was in the middle of Chemo treatments by then. It was August before Moose helped me dig it up. It was fairly clean by then.

I let the skull sit out in the sun for a while and let the rain hit it. Finally, in late September, I used dish detergent, hot water and an old toothbrush and got the remaining detritus out. Then I chucked it and the other skull that had been given the pond treatment into the dishwasher and gave them a good run.

Bleaching was a bear. I had read that the best was to use hair bleach. I bought a kit from a local hairdresser supply. That did next to nothing. The next try was with a paste of Clorox and baking soda. Nothing really changed in the hour or two of recommended application, so I just left it on and went to the farm for the weekend. When I got back, I still did not see much of a change, but I decided to just chuck both heads in the dishwasher again and live with the results.

As you can see from the pictures, the buried head came out of the bleach looking fairly white. Any staining from the clay soil was gone. The pond-soaked head was still heavily stained, but it is not an unpleasant color. My choice, out of the two, would be to take the whiter of the two, but that is only because it seems to fit conventional tastes. The one that got chucked in the pond is quite pleasant as well. It certainly did not get wrecked by the immersion.The method I used for afixing the skull to the board was to use brackets that I found on E-Bay. Look for “European Mount Skull Wall Hanger.”