When it comes to eyes, I feel the life of the mount starts in the eyes. Most of us look into the eyes of each other to communicate and the instinct is to look at a creature in the eyes before scanning the rest of the body. I look at fish the same way. A good fish mount needs a great eye set, just like as with animals and birds. The tricky part of fish eyes is the variety of species and the various colors of eyes they can have. If you take into account the different sizes needed, it’s crazy to have that much inventory in stock waiting to fit into the size fish on your bench. Yes, I keep lots of precolored Flex Eyes in stock, but when I have fish that have larger eyes or need different shapes and profiles, it’s always better to paint them myself.

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Publisher’s note: We had a tremendous response from the many talented winners of the Breakthrough Award for Judges’ Choice Best of Show. With so many excellent professional photos and excellent write-ups about their awards, it filled 15 dedicated pages, too many to fit into this one issue. Instead of running photos small and cutting text so that we could reduce the page numbers, we decided to honor the winners with a two-part series which will continue next issue.

Featured winners from 2019 in this issue:

• NTA  Clint Rickey
• New Zealand—Louise Pearson
• Australia—Ben Carillo
• Canada—Georgie Elekes
• Alabama—Ryan Searce
• Arizona—Terry Johnson
• California—Seth Lane
• Colorado—Doug Barnes
• Florida—Mike Mizelle
• Illinois—Bruce Owens
• Indiana—Chip Wendt
• Kansas—Cory Foth
• Kentucky—Butch Irwin
• Louisiana—Lee Duet

NEXT ISSUE: 2019 BREAKTHROUGH AWARD WINNERS FROM MAINE, QUEBEC, MICHIGAN, MISSISSIPPI, MISSOURI, MONTANA, NEW YORK, NORTH CAROLINA, NORTH DAKOTA, OKLAHOMA, SOUTH DAKOTA, TEXAS, UTAH, VIRGINIA, WYOMING

To subscribe or renew, call us at 800-783-7266 or visit www.breakthroughmagazine.com.

This will be the final part of my three-part reference articles on teal of the world. There are more species and subspecies, but I could not find reference for everyone that is listed in scientific reports. I have featured most that I feel might find their way to a taxidermy studio. In this study you will see photo reference of the following species:

• Marbled teal
• Puna teal
• Red-billed teal
• Ringed teal
• Silver teal
• Yellow-billed Teal

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