Now Ken sang, "But, wait ... what do I seeeeeee..." He held the word in suspension for several seconds. It hung in the air like the shrill cry of an exotic bird. And then it struck me: Ken had brought Roy Orbison back to life.
SOURCES
Behind many a stuffed animal lurks a
thrilling story of travel and adventure.
—WILLIAM HORNADAY, 1896
***
The history of taxidermy, natural history, habitat dioramas, and museums is central to Karen Wonders's amazingly comprehensive study "Habitat Dioramas: Illusions of Wilderness in Museums of Natural History" (Ph.D. diss., Uppsala University, 1993); Stephen Christopher Quinn's Windows on Nature: The Great Habitat Dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History (Abrams, in association with the American Museum of Natural History, 2006), which also contains beautiful photographs; and Stephen T. Asma's Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums (Oxford University Press, 2001). Asma explains with considerable delight why people have always been drawn to the macabre and the strange, and nothing is quite as macabre and strange as a museum of natural history.
An immensely fascinating book about the natural history mania that swept the United Kingdom from 1820 to 1870 is Lynn Barber's The Heyday of Natural History (Doubleday, 1980). This profoundly affecting book about natural history in the pre- and post-Darwin eras provided a rich context essential to my understanding of the world in which the taxidermists I wrote about lived and worked. For an understanding of how the trade was practiced in the nineteenth century, I relied on popular turn-of-the-century taxidermy manuals and on Christopher Frost's self-published A History of British Taxidermy (1987), which describes the era from 1820 to 1910, when Britain was the center of the taxidermic universe, having taken over the role from France and not yet relinquished it to the United States. Pat Morris's splendid article "An Historical Review of Bird Taxidermy in Britain" (Archives of Natural History, 1993) chronicles taxidermy's early development. An Annotated Bibliography on Preparation, Taxidermy, and Collection Management of Vertebrates with Emphasis on Birds by Stephen P. Rogers, Mary Ann Schmidt, and Thomas Gütebier (Carnegie Museum of Natural History, 1989), called the "blue book" for short, is a trove of facts and sources.
For information about specific bird species, I used the Sibley Guide to Birds by David Allen Sibley (Knopf, 2000). For mammalian taxonomy and phylogeny, I relied on the Princeton Field Guides book Mammals of North America by Roland W. Kays and Don E. Wilson (Princeton University Press, 2002) and numerous Web sites, including the National Museum of Natural History's Mammal Species of the World Database, www.nmnhgoph.si.edu/msw. Also see the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources Red List of Threatened Animals, www.iucnredlist.org.
Taxidermy is an obscure topic for which no central archive or comprehensive book exists. If it weren't for the taxidermists themselves—who love to preserve things—countless old manuals, scrapbooks, memoirs, and catalogs would have perished. Thankfully, several taxidermists and taxidermy collectors generously lent me sources from their impressive personal libraries. Additionally, I spent weeks at the AMNH archives and the Explorers Club library in Manhattan.
1. SCHWENDEMAN'S TAXIDERMY STUDIO
The idea for this book grew out of an article I wrote for the New York Times, "When a Polar Bear Needs a Pedicure," which ran on March 26, 2002. For that piece, the AMNH's exceptionally knowledgeable senior project manager, Stephen C. Quinn ("Mr. Diorama"), gave me a private tour of every diorama and display in the museum bearing the mark of David Schwendeman.
Anyone who has had the distinct pleasure of hanging around Schwendeman's Taxidermy Studio for fifteen years (or fifty years) will get to meet every living Schwendeman, every Milltown neighbor and friend, every fellow birder and curiosity seeker who loves to poke around in such anachronistic shops of wonders. In addition to many enjoyable talks with David and Bruce Schwendeman and their extended family and friends, Rose Wadsworth (the AMNH's former exhibition coordinator for living invertebrates) wrote me two anecdote-filled letters and sent me an assortment of photographs, memos, relevant book chapters, and news clips. Further sources include the following articles: "Memories and Lessons from a House of Nature," Home News, March 23, 1986; "Taxidermy—All in the Family," New York Times, October 23, 1977; and the AMNH's employee newsletter, Grapevine (May/June 1983 and January/February 1987).
William Hornaday's quote is from his popular manual Taxidermy and Zoological Collecting (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1891; I used the 1916 edition). This book was used as the basis of Elwood's popular correspondence course, established in 1904 and undertaken by several living taxidermists quoted in this book.
Information on Ker & Downey is from Ker & Downey Safaris: The Inside Story by Jan Hemsing (Sealpoint Publicity, 1989).
It is still possible to see Misty at the Beebe Ranch in Chincoteague, Virginia. Trigger is on display at the Roy Rogers-Dale Evans Museum in Branson, Missouri, as is Dale Evans's horse Buttermilk and Roy Rogers's stuffed German shepherd Bullet.
Charles Darwin's foray into taxidermy is discussed in Stephen Asma's Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads.
A New York Times article on rebuilding Deyrolle ran on November 15, 2008.
My source on contemporary antifur campaigns was Andrew Bolton's Wild: Fashion Untamed (Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004).
The New York Times obituary for Douglas Herrick ran on January 19, 2003.
The Third Annual Report of the Society of American Taxidermists (Gibson Brothers, 1884) contains a bibliography of taxidermy, in which the obscure methods used in the 1700s are described. Additional methods can be found in Amandine Péquignot's "The History of Taxidermy: Clues for Preservation (Collections: A Journal for Museum Archives Professionals, February 2006) and An Annotated Bibliography on Preparation, Taxidermy, and Collection Management of Vertebrates with Emphasis on Birds by Stephen P. Rogers, Mary Ann Schmidt, and Thomas Gütebier, which does a great job of defining the role of the museum taxidermist.
I found Peale's correspondence with Washington in the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology guide About the Exhibits (1964, 1985).
The story of Bécoeur is expertly told by
