Bruce has a striking command of animal anatomy. Even so, people are often surprised to meet a taxidermist with a master's degree. Bruce studied zoology at North Carolina State University, with concentrations in population dynamics and parasitology. After graduation, Carolina Power & Light advertised a job researching the effects of its power lines on migrating bob-white quail. His mother (who banned taxidermy from the family home soon after she married David) encouraged Bruce to apply for the job so that he'd have some financial stability. Instead, he put on a denim apron and took over the shop.
Since then, father and son have preserved everything from three-toed sloths to fireflies. Seventy-five percent of the Schwendemans' work is for museums, nature centers, and zoos, including the Smithsonian Institution and the Philadelphia Zoo. Not long ago, they gave the Explorers Club's polar bear a pedicure (artificial claws), and they restored the Harvard Club's elephant head by sealing its cracked trunk with Yale paper napkins saturated in Elmer's glue. Mostly they are known for their work at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), to which they have an unshakable loyalty. That loyalty does not lie primarily with the curators and exhibition staff, which have sent laughing gulls, sea otters, galagos (bush babies), lemurs, and hornbills to them for mounting since the late 1940s, but with what they call the "stars of the show": the animals. And, naturally, with the taxidermists in whose footsteps they proudly walk.
Because of this, they tend to know every mount that's ever been taken off exhibition or altered and every exhibition hall that has been dismantled to make room for something new—something undoubtedly louder and with more special effects and animatronics—the direction museums have been going since the 1960s, when taxidermy displays gave way to imax theaters and robotic dinosaurs. "When I was a boy, you went to the museum to see the animals" says David, groaning as if in pain. "You went to see the elephants. Nowadays everything's getting gimmicky." They fondly remember, for instance, the old bird halls filled with unadorned glass-fronted wooden cabinets. They blanch when they recall how the museum dismantled Dogs of the World, a gallery of stuffed canines. And they smirk with delight when they describe gory displays sanitized by the museum, such as a vulture picking at a zebra's exposed entrails. "It seems to me that they didn't want the public to see blood and guts," David says, laughing. Often they will try to convince a museum that its old mounts are treasures worth conserving, even if the mounts were preserved by naturalists who knew little about the species (compared to what biologists know today) and are anatomically outmoded: the AMNH's primate hall's aggressive lemurs and monkeys, for example, or the Vanderbilt Museum's thirty-two-foot-long whale shark. (Bruce spent four years restoring William K. Vanderbilt II's megaspecimen, which he believes is the world's largest mounted fish.) At Schwendeman's Taxidermy Studio, the AMNH's very first mammal mount—the ferocious African lion it purchased from the famous Parisian firm Maison Verreaux in 1865—is referred to as it is in the mammalogy department: "Specimen Number 1."
Bruce jokes that one day he'll write a book about the AMNH called Skeletons in the Closet. Until then, he is happy to point out all the fabulous artifacts that David has retrieved from the museum's dumpsters or was given on indefinite loan. "Their garbage forms the nucleus of the treasures of our museum," Bruce said, leading me back to the workshop through a corridor of wooden display cases, which contained, among the bronzes and death masks, two huge condors (Andean and California!) and a passenger pigeon.
Most of the animals are uncanny replicas. Others have been transformed into tiny people, inkwells, or whatever, and he called these items "novelty mounts." A frog strumming a banjo and boxing squirrels were displayed on a glass shelf; Arthur mounted them years ago. Above the cash register, a yellow-eyed jackrabbit looked crossbred with a pronghorn (antelope). "Every taxidermist worth his weight has a jackalope!" Bruce said, beaming. Jackalopes are the weird invention of Wyoming taxidermist Douglas Herrick, who one day in 1932 tossed a dead jackrabbit onto the floor of his workshop. It landed under some deer antlers, spawning the gaudiest icon of the American West. "We have two types," Bruce boasted. "That one came with a certificate of authenticity!"
From a taxidermological perspective, you might think Bruce finds novelty mounts unseemly. But he views them as part of taxidermy history. Victorian homes contained an omnium-gatherum of such artifacts, including anthropomorphic mounts, as viewed through the eyes of Beatrix Potter fans. That said, the most novelty Bruce is willing to offer his clients is bear rugs, which he believes demean bears. "It's disrespectful to, you know, vacuum [a bear rug]," he says. "It's like man's dominance over nature."
Beyond the museum, swinging double doors flanked with the sail of a sailfish and the saw of a sawfish had stenciled on them NO ADMITTANCE. I followed Bruce past the sign and into the workshop: a large cement room, poorly ventilated, with three small windows that let in barely any light. Hanging from a chain above the sink was a woodchuck pelt, and lying upside down on a chair was Arthur's old stuffed terrier, a rental prop for TV commercials. Mostly the shop was full of strange tools with frightfully descriptive names: toe probes, lip tuckers, tail splitters. In the center of the room what looked like a dissection was taking place on a large worktable, which was lit by a single bulb that dangled from a ceiling strung with antlers. That day Bruce's friend Kurt Torok, who helps out in a pinch, was preserving a bald eagle for a nature center.
Kurt's fingers were bloodstained from the pile of fat, brains, and leg muscles he'd been extracting from the bird like a hellbent surgeon. Now he was scraping meat off the skin—"fleshing" to a
