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

"When the blackbirds migrated, we'd get a bunch. We used to eat grackles by the hundreds. During the Depression, we'd eat anything," said David.

"Heck, we do now," said Bruce. "But we're not a butcher shop! It's a fringe benefit, not the norm."

David got up and shuffled out of the workshop and into the yard. He checked his cage of promethea moths, then went over to see if his bamboo garden was producing. When he lifted a capful of O'Doul's out of the soil to see if it had attracted any slugs, it was impossible to picture him in any city, much less New York. As far as David is concerned, the AMNH is a city itself. He simply bypassed Manhattan by riding the C train directly into the museum, commuting the thirty-five miles with a briefcase concealing dead beavers and shrews and the occasional poison dart frog. In twenty-eight years, the only city sidewalk he ever touched was the one he had to cross to go birding in Central Park.

Sometimes when David is feeling wistful, he grabs an old binder labeled "Taxidermy Notes and Formulae" and flicks through its yellowing pages. Whenever he does this, his eyes sparkle and it's as if he's back on the fifth floor of the AMNH in the exhibition department's rich art studios. One day he grabbed the binder and with trembling fingers showed me his secrets for making lifelike plants and animals. It was astonishing to see his range of skills. The book was filled with handwritten recipes and experiments, things that evoked chemistry equations or a wizard's book of potions. One entry had his "starfish solution" (equal parts formalin, water, and glycerin); another, "how to clean an oropendola nest" (make a spray from ten ounces of water, Elmer's glue, and one and a half ounces of glycerin). There was his "formula for bleaching bones" (a paste of hydrogen peroxide and magnesium carbonate), his method for hatching snapping turtle eggs (Mortimer lived for fifteen years), and an entry called "how to make artificial frog eggs."

He pointed to a section called "scorpion experiments," then to "how to anesthetize a lizard" and "relaxing bat study skins." There was a section called "how to make a Plexiglas water line for wading wood storks," his "snake-tanning formula," and instructions for how to fasten a diving cormorant to the wall so that it looks as if it's flying. And there was more: How to "clean live coral. How to make "slushy snow": combine clear resin, a touch of white pigment, and cabosil (a thickening agent); add enough small glass beads to create the consistency of cream (gives it luster); add ten drops of catalyst; let it set up for fifteen minutes). How to "set up earthworms for casting": inject the worms with vinyl acetate before molding. How to "make artificial algae": boil Angora goat hair with yellow-green fabric dye. And on and on.

David was born in 1924, three years after his father sold his first deer head and Lillian skinned her first pheasant. The original workshop was in the family home, in what is now David's kitchen. It sold bait and tackle and was open 24-7. People would ring the buzzer at three A.M. looking for shiners, and David would trudge down in his pajamas to fill orders, sarcastically mumbling, "I've been waiting up all night for you." In the early years, their customers were local hunters who wanted their pheasants and small mammals mounted, and the place took on the seasonal rhythm of a farm: rails, grouse, quail, and pheasants in early fall; deer and ducks in mid-fall; turkeys and bears in spring; fish and woodchucks in summer. Before they had a freezer, Lillian would skin the birds while the hunters waited, and she'd hand back the meat wrapped in paper. (Now Bruce tells his customers to get two: one for mounting, the other for dinner.)

As a boy, David hung around the shop, cleaning deer skulls and getting in his father's way. He loved to wander outdoors to listen to spring peepers (little frogs), green frogs, and katydids. Mostly he trapped foxes and went frogging, birding, and hunting for tree stumps. Sometimes he'd grab a camera and wade into the swamps behind the house, looking for red-winged blackbird or least bittern nests and grebes. He'd come home sopping wet, and Arthur would scold him by saying it was okay to watch birds now, but as a man it would be a problem. He never stopped. Once, when he was fourteen, he sat by the old dirt road that ran by their house sketching a little green heron. A man rode by on horseback and took him for a Boy Scout. David was infuriated. "You had to be a Boooooy Scout to look at birds!" he says with a mock whine. "Now it's strange here," he says reflectively. "I think they spray. I haven't seen a bat all summer. Used to see them flying around. Now it's all houses; it's all gone now."

Birds are the workshop's specialty. However, the first animal the Schwendemans mounted for the AMNH was a venomous lizard: a Gila monster. Gila monsters are classified as Heloderma suspectum. They have forked tongues and scaly bodies that are typically two feet long. Arthur's brother boxed up the live lizard and mailed it to Milltown from Arizona. Arthur put it in a cage and kept his distance, in case it spit poison. "Boy, did I want to touch that thing, but we weren't allowed, because we didn't know if it was alive or dead," David recalls with boyish enthusiasm. It was dead, so Arthur mounted it, and the uncle called up the museum and asked if they wanted it. They did—and then they offered Arthur a job. Arthur hated cities and said he would work from home. But when David turned eleven, he begged his mother to sign him up as a museum member. It was 1936—the heyday of the diorama—and that year "members day" fell on