One trick we picked up years ago from the museum at KU (Kansas, that is) is to put round study skins into clear acrylic pipe, pad the caps with ethafoam and cap the ends. It works best with skins that have the dowel left protruding past the tail, so that the bird balances on the beak and the tip of the dowel. Glue the caps on so folks can't remove them. 

The folks at KU had an outreach program for the entire state and developed this way to make the skins last - our same 50 skins have been visiting for about 17 years this way. We also have 3 in hands-on exhibits. In all this time we have had three losses: a roadrunner was dropped and the tube broke, a grebe was dropped and lost its head (through a grebe-ious error?), although the tube stayed intact, and a hummingbird simply vanished. The skins we are using were mostly mounted in the late 1960's, so they had been around for a while to start with.

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