Once when I visited, 180 birds Bruce had salvaged from an old wildlife museum filled the front room. Another time I encountered a pack of deciduous-forest dwellers (beaver, raccoon, black bear, skunk, turkey vulture, chipmunk, rabbit) preserved at the request of Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History, which planned to transport Connecticut to Greece for the 2004 Olympics.
I first found myself drawn to Schwendeman's Taxidermy Studio in 1994, when I returned from a trip to Africa to visit my in-laws, who lead safaris for Ker & Downey. The company was founded in 1946 by big-game hunters. Now it's conservation minded and has taken Meryl Streep, Prince Charles, and other famous people on safari in discreet comfort. But not, as it turned out, me.
When I landed in Nairobi, I was informed that I was going to join a group of seasoned guides on a fourteen-day reconnaissance trek through the most barren stretch of Tanzania—an area so remote, the animals had never seen people before. The purpose of the trip was to scout out potential concession areas for future safaris. The guides called it "the real thing." No jeeps or radio—we'd be out of range. It was all very nineteenth-century—the kind of foot expedition the early specimen hunters and museum taxidermists went on when natural scientists were building their amazing collections—only we weren't going to shoot anything.
Coming from New Jersey, I thought it was impossible, even undesirable, to escape civilization, but we did (for a while, anyhow), and the isolation and wildlife were extraordinary, the birds too beautiful for words. On the last night, the leader, dressed in a loincloth, grabbed his shotgun and suggested we take an evening game walk. Somehow, we met up with a group of Belgian hunters who were camping nearby. They invited us back to camp for a drink. While the guides and hunters talked shop, I mistakenly wandered into the carcass room, where the hunters stored their kills. The salted pelts, hung high on pegs, were eyeless, mangled, and limp. They smelled bloody and metallic: the unmistakable stench of decay. I wasn't sure what was more shocking: the human violence after all the tranquility or the idea that someone was going to transform these vestiges into something else. Trophies, I assumed. I wanted to know more. Was taxidermy just the creation of an ornamental souvenir? Or was there more to it?
Taxidermy is the art of taking an animal's treated skin and stretching it over an artificial form such as a manikin, then carefully modeling its features in a lifelike attitude. The word is derived from the Greek roots taxis, "arrangement," and derma, "skin," although its usage became prominent only in the early 1800s when taxidermy began its evolution from a crude way of preserving skins to advance science into a highly evolved art form whose chief objective is to freeze motion.
The first person to use the word was the French naturalist Louis Dufresne, taxidermist at the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle in Paris, who wrote about it in the scientific reference book Nouveau dictionnaire d'histoire naturelle (1803). Taxidermy, he suggested, differed sharply from embalming and other forms of preservation because its primary goal was aesthetic: to capture a species' magnificence by faithfully replicating its every quirk and feature in a realistic mount. In this, taxidermy was a magical mix of science, art, and theater, an incomparable tool for displaying the wonder and beauty of animals, particularly rare bird species for natural history cabinets—the private collections of natural wonders and oddities that gave rise to modern museums. (Birds were far easier to preserve than mammals, whose musculature and facial expressions took decades to hone.)
Two hundred years have passed since Dufresne first used the term. Nature documentaries and DNA sequencing have long replaced the cabinets of curiosities and study skins (bird skins used to compare species by type). The grand era of the natural history museum diorama has come and gone. So if the Belgians' animal skins weren't museum bound, what would become of them? What compels people to want to transform animals into mantelpiece trophies, tacky roadside totems, or even diorama specimens? On the one hand, nothing seems as ludicrous as taking an animal and transforming it into a replica of itself. Why kill it in the first place? On the other hand, few objects are as strangely alluring as Flaubert's parrot, Goethe's kingfisher, or Truman Capote's rattlesnake. Or, for that matter, as out of context as, say, Fenway Partners' upright grizzly bear on the fifty-ninth floor of its midtown Manhattan office.
There's something arresting and haunting about taxidermy when expertly done by museum masters such as the Schwen-demans, and something morbid and kitschy about taxidermy when it's used to make effigies of famous animals such as "Misty of Chincoteague" (the equine heroine of Marguerite Henry's novel; now a moth-cut tourist attraction near Virginia Beach) or Roy Rogers's horse Trigger. It's hard to look at taxidermy and be indifferent, and I can't think of too many art forms—most taxidermists do want you to call it art—that stir up such pathos and bathos, as museums and artists such as Damien Hirst are keenly aware. Taxidermy makes you laugh and feel uneasy and inspired all at the same time, a powerful clash.
During the years I spent researching this book, I discovered that the most gifted taxidermists are an almost comically disparate group who argue about everything except this: nothing is either as loved or as
