Is there an equally effective way to get the feathers of a bird to fluff without using a tumbler? I'm just starting out and sort of poking around taxidermy as a hobby and don't have the money to soak into a tumbler just yet. I have two bobwhites that I'd like to mount, and the last two birds I did I used a friend's tumbler, but he's visiting florida for the next several months and his shop is all closed up. (After he finishes the season's work, he goes out on fishing trips from his brother's condo on the coast).

Is there any other way?

You can make a poor mans tumbler, put baffles in a drum and hand roll it. Or you can use a hair dryer and a compressor.

A tumbler is the quickest way to dry a bird,we do around 1100 turkeys a year so to speed up the time we use a tumbler. For our individual show mounts that we take to taxidermy competitions we dont tumble them at all. This is becausewhen you tumble them it can damage the feathers, morethe wings than anything, so we dont take the chance on it.A tumbler isn't a have to have item in a taxidermy shop. It helps a lot when your doing a large number of birds just for the fact that it speeds up your time that you have in your work. After we get done washing our birds we hanging them up and let them drip out for about an hour. Then we hang them in front of a large fan until some of the feathers start to fluff up. Usually around 20-30 min. After that we blow dry them until they are dry. The only problem that occurs in not useing a tumbler is the skin drying out to quickly. If we start to feel the skin getting dry on the inside we just spray it down with a water bottle. Hope i could help you. Good luck!
Drake Morris