The Dutch man responsible for turning his dead cat into a remote-controlled helicopter has invented yet another flying animal machine, this time from a dead ostrich.
Visual artist Bart Jansen, with the help of technical engineer Arjen Beltman, and financial support from RC Technics, has created OstrichCopter from a male ostrich that died of a disease at an ostrich farm.
Jansen told Wired.co.uk that he had first got hold of the ostrich for another installation called Road Kill Big Bird.
When he finally obtained the bird, he decided to use it for another flying machine instead.
According to Wired.co.uk, Jansen said of OstrichCopter: “I thought it was really funny to make fly a bird that can’t [fly]”
OstrichCopter is nine feet long and weighs around 46 pounds, and was completely built from scratch.
“We ordered everything and tried to find out what it was going to weigh in total and then pick our engines and our props accordingly,” he said.
He then created a ostrich body scaffold using spray insulation foam. “Getting the shape done was the most difficult part. I looked at hundreds of pictures of live ostriches, dead ones, skinned ones to try and figure out what its body looked like. I had to then fit the skin around it and found that in some places I had too much foam and in others not enough. The skin then got a bit mildewy and I had to take it back to the taxidermist to treat it.”
In addition to building OstrichCopter, Jansen is working on a jacket made out of roadkill hedgehogs. He currently has 19, but needs more.
