Owen uses a range of bone, tusks, and teeth, however for beginner carvers he recommends cow leg bone, which is solid and reasonably thick, inexpensive, and available from supermarket butcheries, farmers, and home kill.
Cow bone is hard and rather brittle, whereas deer antler is softer, fibrous, more flexible, and breaks less easily. There are eight antlered species of deer in New Zealand.
Emu is quite brittle — he uses this along with ostrich leg bones for flutes; and makes small carvings out of tagua nut, or vegetable ivory – a legally available material that grows on palm trees in South America. Whale bone, theoretically, is flexible, he says, and harder to come by.
Mammoth bone, 40,000 years old, can be legally imported from Alaska, Canada, and Russia. A solid…