Still Life, Melissa Milgrom [pdf e book reader .TXT] 📗

be able to hang from a boom. (Taxidermists don't use actual skin for fish mounts anymore, because the skins curl, ooze grease, and ruin the paintings.) By the early 1980s, David's taxidermy jobs at the museum had dwindled, and he was mostly restoring faded old mounts. For the Hall of Biology of Birds, he had to revive five hundred birds preserved in the 1930s. The heron's wings had snapped, the Andean condor had shriveled, and ultraviolet light had discolored the crimson breast of the trogon and turned the pink flamingo white. "Capturing the iridescence of the colors with paint is the most difficult part of the work," he said at the time in the employee newsletter. Other jobs followed: tail extensions for Carl Akeley's elephants; feather cloaks for the Hall of Pacific Peoples; and gardens and gardens of artificial plants. When he retired in 1987, his colleagues threw him a big party and baked him a cake in the shape of a muskox. "And they did a nice job on it, too!" says Bruce.

After he retired, David put on a denim apron and joined Bruce in the family workshop, mounting specimens for the AMNH, which no longer had a taxidermist on staff. In 2002, they preserved cormorants and a sea otter for the second renovation of the Hall of Ocean Life. Bruce had to implant 120 monofilament whiskers into the sea otter by hand, something he calls "a cold-sweat job." They also preserved the laughing gulls in the Hall of Saurischian Dinosaurs. The gulls sway above the maniraptor case like a fantastic mobile. If you walked into the hall and gazed up at them, as I have done many times, you'd realize that taxidermy is indeed magical. When the birds arrived in Milltown, they were frozen and bloody; missing feathers, feet, and eyes; and marred with bullet holes (airports shoot down nuisance birds before they fly into airborne planes and cause crashes).

In 1995, Bruce mounted forty West African mammals and birds for the Hall of Biodiversity, a new-style diorama that takes you through an African rain forest. Some of the primate skins were one hundred years old and arrived at the shop without reference. "Reference" is the scientific data taxidermists use to make their replicas. It can be photographs, skeletons, diagrams, even DNA sequencing, anything that helps them sculpt forms that support the biological narrative. Every detail of the animal's anatomy must be convincing in order to pull off the trick: a jaguar's whiskers can purr or roar; a hunting dog's perked ears can sense danger or sniff prey. Taxidermists call this "translating reference." They translate reference all the time. Without a skeleton, however, they have to improvise. When taxidermists improvise, they often turn to the natural world. David walked over to his garden, clicked open his jackknife, and chopped down bamboo stalks of varying lengths and widths to mimic primate femurs and tibias. Then father and son sat side by side and made skeletons out of homegrown bamboo.

At first I just liked to hang around Schwendeman's Taxidermy Studio and listen to David and Bruce banter back and forth. Then I started to notice that each time I visited, they were working on a different species that required an entirely new set of skills and anatomical knowledge. During these visits, I began to realize that these two taxidermists, often stereotyped as "animal killers," were teaching me to see the infinite variation in all living things. I figured that if I hung around the Schwendemans long enough, maybe they'd open up to me, and eventually they did.

Soon it was evident that taxidermy was a thriving subculture that extended far beyond Main Street. Some 100,000 taxidermists, mostly commercial practitioners, exist, and they come alive in Taxidermy Today, Breakthrough, and other trade magazines. I wanted to meet them. I wanted to find out if they shared the Schwendemans' extraordinary skills and fascinations. So in April 2003, I left Milltown and the cloistered world of these taxidermologists, with their eagle dissections and stories of Mum-Mum the skinner, and booked a room at the Crowne Plaza in Springfield, Illinois, where taxidermists from across the globe were gathering to strut their stuff as celebrated animal artists.

2. THE CHAMPIONS

HAVING DRIVEN FOURTEEN HUNDRED snow-slick miles from Cody, Wyoming, Ray Hatfield was now in the lobby of the Crowne Plaza in Springfield, Illinois, pushing a brass luggage cart with a snow leopard perched on it. He pushed it onto the elevator, rode up to the ninth floor, and then rolled it down the hall to room 918, where he placed the leopard on one of the double beds, its spots curiously blending in with the oak-leaf pattern of the bedspread. Hatfield walked slow circles around the leopard, inspecting it for imperfections. In his hand was a gunmetal silver blow dryer.

Hatfield runs Nature's Design Taxidermy, a big commercial studio, which serves mostly hunters. He is tall and soft-spoken, with tawny hair and aviator eyeglasses that adapt to the sunlight. On the drive to Springfield, he'd delivered several trophies to customers along the way: elk and deer, a buffalo, an ibex, and a Marco Polo sheep. A few mounts, including the snow leopard, got wet when melting snow leaked into his cargo trailer. Under normal circumstances, damp capes ("cape" is the term used for the animal's pelt, or skin), if quickly caught, are an easy problem to fix. On this day, however, Hatfield couldn't risk even a minor flaw. "I'm trying to get all of its hairs separated down to the skin and make all of the hair patterns lie in place," he said, clutching a wire brush that rapidly filled with soft golden fur. "Everything has to be just right for the competition."

Hatfield was hopeful of winning a ribbon with the leopard, but his expectations were not high. In this he was realistic. Three hundred fifty taxidermists from twenty-two countries were competing for twelve Best in World titles and $25,600 in cash prizes. For the next five days,