Still Life

by Melissa Milgrom

  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 taxidermist—so the skin would absorb borax, a preservative used to soak up fat and repel insects. In taxidermy, an animal starts out looking like the animal, gets mangled beyond recognition, and then ends up looking like the animal again. This eagle was mangled beyond recognition. Kurt pointed to a bald patch on its belly where its feathers had been ripped out by a truck, then he extended its long yellow talons. Its purple carcass dangled from a skinning hook near Bruce. A fan sent the stench of rotten meat circling around the humid workshop.

  Kurt went over to the skinning hook and took down the carcass. He set it on the worktable, then began cutting into it with poultry shears. It still had the skeleton inside, which seemed odd; I had always thought taxidermists used skeletons as armatures to support the skin, but I was wrong by about three hundred years. In the 1700s, when taxidermy manuals were useful only to specimen collectors who wanted to know how to preserve birds for transport, people did use skeletons as armatures. In fact, they had all kinds of convoluted ways for preserving animals. One of the first people to describe his methods was the French naturalist R.A.F. Réaumur. In 1748, Réaumur offered four ways to preserve birds for travel: he stuffed their skinned bodies with straw, hay, and wood; he soaked them in spirits, then packed them in barrels of oat or barley chaff; he essentially mummified them with preserving powders; and, of course, he baked them. E. Bancroft's method for preserving Guyanese birds for natural history cabinets (1769) resembles a recipe for coq au vin: after he stuffed the skinned birds with salt and alum, he marinated them in rum for two days, then baked them. When death came knocking for George Washington's golden pheasants (a gift from Louis XVI), Charles Willson Peale (portraitist, naturalist, and fossil hunter) desperately wanted the skins for his Repository for Natural Curiosities in Philadelphia. In 1787, he sent Washington these instructions: "If the weather should be warm, be pleased to order the Bowels to be taken out and some Pepper put into the Body, but no Salt which would spoil the feathers." Washington agreed: "He made his Exit yesterday, which enables me to comply with your request much sooner than I wished to do."

  Some taxidermists steamed wings, talons, and webbed feet to make them supple. Others coated bodies in liquid varnish or preserved skins with sal ammoniac (ammonium chloride), corrosive sublimate (mercuric chloride), or mixtures of wine, turpentine, and camphor. In 1771, Captain'T. Davies described how he extracted bird tongues, brains, and eyes through the mouths of his evi
scerated creatures. Then he stuffed their heads with camphor-soaked cotton and inserted black eyes that he had made from candle wax.

  If these methods sound nothing remotely like taxidermy, that's because the first taxidermists were not taxidermists. One of the earliest documented taxidermy collections was preserved in the early 1500s by chemists. A Dutch nobleman's prized cassowaries, which he had brought home from India, suffocated in an overheated aviary (his furnace door had been left open and baked the birds). Distraught, the owner had the leading local chemists devise a method for preserving them. They treated the skins with spices, crudely mounted them using wires, and affixed them to a perch, frozen in time.

  For the next three hundred years, the practice of taxidermy was, in a nutshell, a series of attempts to animate nature while preventing it from taking its course. Before arsenical soap was used as an insecticide and preservative, most mounts lasted no more than thirty years before they became moth-eaten or began to decompose. Except for the duchess of Richmond's African grey parrot in Westminster Abbey and George Washington's pheasants at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, few specimens predate the 1830s. This would all change when taxidermists—notoriously secretive—began to divulge their private formulas.

  Kurt glanced up. A sly smile spread across his face. He considered the purple carcass. "Wanna sex it?" David, who was sitting in his rocker, snickered. I reached for my car keys.

  "Quit showing off!" Bruce shouted. Although he knows that scientific specimens are always identified by their sex, age, and location where they were collected, he wanted me to view taxidermy as dignified and had no patience for taxidermy jokes. "Look at what their [people's] exposure is: Psycho, Jeffrey Dahmer. And all of the horror movies, like Dracula, always have taxidermy on the walls. Disney has a problem with taxidermy. In 101 Dalmatians, taxidermy was evil—they wanted to make a coat out of puppies. Even The Simpsons had a runaway parade float, and someone almost got speared by a mounted swordfish! So it's perpetrated as a weird thing, not necessarily a bad thing, just unusual and creepy."

  Taxidermy does have a creepy reputation, but taxidermists can blame only so much of it on Hollywood. Taxidermy was considered shady even in its heyday. In fact, except for five years in the 1880s, when taxidermists banded together to form the Society of American Taxidermists (SAT), the first professional taxidermy association (whose members would eventually revolutionize museum displays), again in 1972, when the National Taxidermists Association was formed (followed by Britain's Guild of Taxidermists and others), taxidermists, who tend to be solitary workers, purposely cut themselves off from the outside world. No other profession has so steadfastly barred visitors from its dreary workshops, a decision that makes sense if you've ever seen someone flesh a bald eagle with tweezers.

  Before refrigeration, it was even worse. Back then, taxidermy workshops were vile. Gruesome dissections took place in dark, smelly rooms that were stifling hot in the summer. Arsenic, formalin, carbon tetrachloride, and other dangerous chemicals that taxidermists used as preservatives were stored in open containers and filled the workshops' stagnant air with carcinogenic dust.

  That said, the ghastly workshop is only one reason for taxidermy's insularity. The other reason is that taxidermy is an incredibly time-consuming handicraft. Few have ever prospered by stuffing other people's animals. "You don't become rich as a taxidermist," says Bruce. For this reason alone, it seems, taxidermists have always been incredibly suspicious of one another—citing the first law of nature, self-preservation, as the cause. Before 1972, taxidermists hoarded information, passing it down strictly from father to son, master to apprentice. Countless recipes for saline pickle (a tanning solution) and arsenical soap have died with some stingy taxidermist. When the French apothecary Jean-Baptiste Bécoeur, for instance, invented arsenical soap in 1743, he refused to share the recipe with other naturalists because he wanted a job with the Cabinet du Roi, the royal collection that became the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle after the French Revolution. He didn't want to help his rivals because their birds might outshine his own. (He didn't get the job.) Exceptions existed, of course. William Hornaday found his colleagues' behavior exceptionally puerile and said so in an 1880 issue of Science: "If painters and sculptors had always been as narrow-minded, jealous, and absurdly exclusive of their knowledge as we have ever been (with but few exceptions) their art would stand no higher to-day than ours."

  Now Bruce wanted to dispel some misconceptions. He started with the popular notion that taxidermists derive pleasure from killing animals. The Schwendemans never kill animals for taxidermy, acquiring their specimens from natural death or roadkill—except for a Norway rat that Bruce's sister drowned for the AMNH's exhibition on epidemics. ("They didn't send us a decent specimen," he explained. "Central Park has the smelliest old rats.") Other fallacies are that taxidermists start the day off with a beer (David drinks only after five); that nothing repulses a taxidermist (Bruce faints at the sight of human blood, especially his own; he also thinks it's gross to preserve dogs and cats); and, most important, that taxidermists "stuff" animals.

  Before taxidermists made careful studies of animal anatomy, they did stuff skins with sawdust and rags, making for lopsided and disfigured specimens. Even John James Audubon, who shot and preserved thousands of birds to use as models for his illustrations, failed to mimic life until he invented a way to wire wings in naturalistic poses. Today highly skilled taxidermists mount animals with unerring perfection using an astonishing range of prefabricated manikins and fake animal parts—rippled tongues, plastic claws, colorful glass eyes—that used to take pioneering taxidermists years of careful field observations to sculpt by hand (which is why the Schwendemans sarcastically call it "modelmaking"). However, much like store-bought Halloween costumes, store-bought anatomy means limited choices of species and poses. "You can't buy a manikin for a dwarf galago from a supply catalog!" Bruce says. The best taxidermists still insist on sculpting their own forms, trusting their own articulations even over those at museums, whose models vary from era to era.

  Bruce practices what he calls "good taxidermy": respect for the laws of nature and conservation. For David, whose work had to meet the imposing standards of renowned mammalogists, herpetologists, and ornithologists, that's a given, and therefore he loves to provoke Bruce. Whenever Bruce says an animal was "liquidated," "collected," "culled," or "dispatched," David thunders, "Killed!" When Bruce says "sportsman," David groans "hunter." David also prefers "workshop" to "studio." "Oh, we could get fancy and call it a studio," he says, rolling his eyes.

  David is extraordinarily unpretentious. People from the AMNH remember him as a humble, hardworking naturalist with an uncanny intuition for animal forms. For example, when Rose Wadsworth, the museum's former exhibition coordinator for living invertebrates, brought him a flying lizard from Asia that he had never seen, he positioned it with the sensitivity of a local who had grown up with it in his own backyard. Indeed, to understand David you have to understand his deep devotion to wildlife, especially birds.

  David is a purist: a birder's birder. He loathes the term "bird watcher," for instance, because it implies lists and rarity. David would rather observe a common species a million times, just to see the sunlight hit its covet feathers as it banks into a salt marsh, than to glimpse an exotic species for a nanosecond and then race off to see the next one. For David, the walk counts more than the birds. In this, he's the definition of the old-school taxidermist—a field naturalist who believes the only way to replicate an animal faithfully is to study it in its native haunts.

  The first day I met him, however, David wanted to talk about eating bald eagle. (Taxidermists love to joke about eating specimens, especially if a specimen is rare, endangered, or politically charged.) So what does it taste like? I asked.

  "Like bald eagle!" he said with a chuckle.

  Then he went over to the eagle carcass, glanced at it, and said, "Looks like ovaries. An adult female."

  He sat
back down and rocked in the afternoon heat. The rocker is the center of David's universe, the focus from which all the significant places in his life radiate, like the points on a compass: "up there" (the AMNH), "back there" (his house), "in here" (the workshop), and "the cabin" (the log house his parents built by hand and lived in until they died). Dressed in khaki from head to toe, worn leather work boots, and a leather belt with a brass buckle, he looked like a safari guide who got lost and ended up in New Jersey. He had folded paper for jotting field notes in his breast pocket and a small jackknife in his pants pocket, and he was smoking a pipe. He handed me a business card that said DAVID J. SCHWENDEMAN, CHIEF PREPARATORY TAXIDERMIST, AMNH, RETIRED.

  "I was in my teens when I did my first mount. I mounted a starling," he said.

  "Mine was a grackle," said Bruce. "Pup-Pup's was a pigeon. Mum-Mum's was a blue jay."

  "My mother was really a skinner; she could skin anything," enthused David. He puffed on his pipe and continued. "She used to bake those pies. Is that what you'd call a blackbird pie?"

  "Four-and-twenty blackbirds," said Bruce as he fastened antlers to a deer head manikin he was filing into shape.

  "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.