Living in the rural South as a child in the 1950s, I loved animals. Maybe I was destined to try my hand at taxidermy.
Taxidermy is “the art of preparing, stuffing, and mounting the skins of animals with lifelike effect,” including tanning skins and making rugs. The term comes from the Greek-Latin “taxis” (“to move or arrange”) and “derma” (“skin”).
“Taxidermy began in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries to preserve specimens collected by world-traveling explorers,” says Matt Blitz (Smithsonian.com). Taxidermy, especially of birds, was “popular as Victorian-era home decoration.” Using arsenic in soap to protect specimens, led “to a golden age of taxidermy that spanned from about 1840 through the dawn of World War I.” Today, arsenic is banned in most countries, and “Borax and tanning techniques are often used as alternatives.”
In the mid-1950s, I saw a Northwestern School of Taxidermy (NST) advertisement in “Outdoor Life” magazine. I ordered a booklet containing enticements such as this one:
“BECAUSE REAL GAME CONSERVATION PRACTICES ARE NECESSARY TO PRESERVE OUR WILD-GAME! Unrestricted hunting is the thing of the past. … TAXIDERMY makes up for this restricted shooting. It enables the sportsman to DOUBLE his enjoyment from hunting or fishing, by being able to preserve PERMANENTLY all of his finest trophies. There is no surer way for you to greatly INCREASE your hunting pleasure than to learn TAXIDERMY. … Any average man or boy who takes our course, studies and practices the lessons … is ALMOST CERTAIN to find ways of turning his knowledge into CASH.”
I considered sending $10 to order the nine NST “to be sequentially mailed” lessons, and something my parents did helped me decide to “go for it."
My family moved us from our 13-acre farm to nearby Greer, S.C. Before I started 7th grade, my parents bought a mounted gray squirrel from Ford McKinney, who worked in a textile mill but learned taxidermy as a hobby. The squirrel – purchased for $25 or less – held a hickory nut between its front feet and sat upright on a log with its tail curled upward in an “S” shape. That squirrel influenced me to order the lessons.
The NST was located at 1202 Howard St. in Omaha, Nebraska. J.W. Elwood founded the school in 1903. It also sold taxidermy supplies. In the early 1900s, “taxidermy was known to only a few; the methods had been kept secret,” sources say. “But Mr. Elwood believed he could teach it by mail just as effectively as he had done it with his friends in his home.”
Stephen Rogers says many who took up taxidermy over 45 years ago “had their beginnings with the old J.W. Elwood Northwestern School of Taxidermy Correspondence School.” Rogers says Elwood “made a ‘killing’ by ‘teaching’ taxidermy to the common folk.” His NST lessons are still offered, at times, on E-bay.
I received my first NST booklet; it was about mounting birds. Few illustrations accompanied the black-and-white printed pages. I stayed at my paternal grandparents’ nearby farm for a few days and carried my Red Ryder BB gun. An electric line crossed my grandparents’ pasture, and I spotted an Eastern Meadowlark perched on one of the wires. My shot hit the bird in the chest, and it plummeted. Growing up in farming country and seeing animals processed for food or being “put down,” I didn’t feel many twangs of conscience about that lark’s demise. But I had heard in church that a sparrow did not fall to the ground without God knowing about it, and I thought about that.
I laid the bird on a newspaper on a table and read something like this from my lesson: “The breast of a bird is bare. This is a great boon to the taxidermist.” I parted feathers covering the meadowlark’s torso. Its breast was, indeed, bare. Per instructions, I made an incision from the top to the bottom of the breast with my X-Acto knife.
I skinned the bird, taking out the body but leaving the skull, plus bones in the wings and feet. Brain tissue had to be removed. I cut tissue from the skull’s exterior and later replaced tissue with clay. The feathers unfortunately gathered moisture during flesh removal. Years later, someone wrote about that lesson: “Mounting small birds calls for a lot more patience and skill than most young boys can muster.”
I had ordered supplies from NST and used NST wire to fashion the bird’s skeleton. Wires extended through the feet to a wooden pedestal. Around that wire skeleton, I wrapped something called “Kara-flex,” as I recall. It was an artificial straw-like material. I looped string around the Kara-flex and ordered glass eyes for the meadowlark. Weeks later, my finished product disappointed me – the pitiful meadowlark appeared bedraggled.
Lesson two, telling how to stuff a squirrel, arrived, and someone gave me a harvested squirrel. Beginning with an incision down the subject’s front, the skinning progressed over the head and to the nose, which had to stay connected to the skull. I scraped off skull tissue but had no stomach for removing the brain, which was bigger than the bird’s brain I had removed. My grandmother dipped into the skull with a tiny spoon and took out the brain. I skinned the squirrel to his feet and tail. To preserve his skin, I soaked it in an alum solution for a day or two, as I recall.
I procured a log slab with bark intact and planned to position my squirrel as though he were running up the side of a tree but pausing and peering slightly downward, as though looking for danger. I drilled holes in the slab to later receive wires extending from the squirrel’s feet.
I sculpted the replacement body from Kara-flex, wrapping it around wire serving as a skeleton. That wire also ran up inside the tail, parallel to the bone left inside.
After pulling the skin over the sculpted torso, I stitched it together at the incision site. I think I cemented the glass eyes in place before returning the skin to the skull and filling the squirrel’s mouth with colored NST wax. I laid the squirrel, stomach-down, on the slab and inserted feet wires into drilled holes. I bent the wires on the slab’s backside and covered them with felt. I attached a hanger and hung the trophy on a wall, adjusting the squirrel’s tail to flow downward in a subtle “S” shape. My folks thought my squirrel turned out better than the meadowlark.
Someone gave me a hawk, and I tried to stuff it. Mr. Hawk went from “handsome” to appearing underweight and having been, as the old folks used to say, “beat with an ugly stick.”
Somebody gave me another squirrel, but after I soaked his hide in alum solution, most of his hair came out. That was my last taxidermy project. I gave someone my nine lessons. All my “trophy mounts” – including my best one, the “squirrel climbing a tree” – ended up in the county dump.
After WWI, photography began replacing taxidermy. Museums finished creating most habitat dioramas by the 1940s, sources say, and big game hunting became less socially acceptable after WWII. The Northwestern School of Taxidermy reportedly went out of business around 1980. But now there is a revival of taxidermy, and many women are participating, some say. Pat Morris, author of “A History of Taxidermy: Art, Science, and Bad Taste,” says a “sense of getting back in touch with the physical world is at the core of taxidermy’s rebirth.”
According to writer Matt Blitz, Ms. Allis Markham, who worked as Walt Disney Corporation’s director of social media strategy, completed a deer specimen during a 2-week taxidermy school and felt a sense of accomplishment. “It existed in the real world and not on a computer,” Markham said. She quit her job to open a business called “Prey Taxidermy” in Los Angeles. She creates “ethical” pieces, meaning that no animal she works on died solely for taxidermy.
I don’t intend to try stuffing any more creatures, despite reports of a taxidermy revival. I admire the art, but if I had to stuff another bird or an animal, I might go a little squirrelly.
