Moose Head Mounts By Reimond Grignon
I do quite a few moose heads every year. The above moose head is a large moose head I mounted for a customer. The rack on this moose it large and very beautiful. As you can see it has lots of tine on each antler. Those tines are what makes the rack so beautiful.
Not many moose have lots of tines like this one has. Most moose I do have the large shovels but not so many tines. I would say that maybe one in a hundred have racks with a bunch of tines on the rack.
The above show a couple more really large moose head mounts. These are complete shoulder mounts which most people want. Practically no one wants a shortened moose neck mount. In fact it is impossible to buy a neck mount moose form today, and if the moose rack is large it would be almost impossible to hang one on any wall!
You can see that it takes a lot of hide to make a shoulder mount moose head. You really don't want to cut them short. You need to cut all the way around the animal behind the front legs, then peel all the skin forward before cutting the moose head and hide off the animal.
They do not make neck mount moose head forms. So if you cut off the neck too short you are going to have to pay more to get the moose mounted because of all the extra sewing time it takes to sew everything back together.
Check out the how life like the eye of the moose below is!
If you cut off your moose neck too short you not only have to pay extra to have it sewn back up (it can take hours) but you have to have that extra hide that you cut off. If you no longer have that extra hide, you will have to get it off another hunter who doesn't want his moose head mounted. That is going to also cost you one way or the other. For example. If you bring in a nice shoulder mount hide, I send that hide to the worlds best tannery. It comes back nice and soft and will last many, many years. Your grand kids, kids will have your moose someday.
Now that tannery is going to charge me for tanning one moose cape. If you cut it off short, I am now sending them two pieces. They are now going to charge me for that second piece of moose cape. And shipping and tanning is not cheap!
I do NO in house tanning of any deer, bear or moose capes. I find none of them work well and the life span of such hides are quite short. Moose capes are very thick in places. They have to be shaved down and tanned correctly. I believe in the philosophy of getting things done right the first time, always ends up being better and cheaper in the long run.
If you want to see more information about tanning go to the bottom of the Rugs and More Rugs page
Large Bugling Moose Head Mounted by Reimond Grignon
I always wanted to mount a moose head bugling mount like they do Elk head bugling mounts. Moose do bugle like the western Elks do. Of course their sound is not the same. But everyone told me that a moose neck would be too short to fit a hard turned form like a bugling Elk form. I thoughts nuts, I've mounted dozens of moose heads and know better. I then looked in every taxidermy supply house catalog and not a single hard turned bugling moose head form could I find.
I do quite a bit of sculpturing myself and so I decided to make my own form. I also wanted an open mouth in it as seen above so I had to make my own teeth and tongue as well. It took me a quite few weeks to make the form, then time to mount and finish this critter but the results were worth it as you can see a above. As far as I know this is properly still the only mounted hard turned bugling moose head in the world. I've still yet to see a form like it in any catalog or forms. See the head detail below.
