In 1883, the Smithsonian bought Tree-Tops and displayed it in its Hall of Mammals for a curious public eager for science. Sometimes Hornaday would visit the museum to see if his masterpiece held up in light of the latest phylogenetic discoveries. He was never anything less than sanguine. "Yes; even forty years after we are not ashamed of it; for it is sufficiently near to the standards of to-day to be entitled to a place in the sun," he boasted in his 1925 memoir, A Wild-Animal Round-up: Stories and Pictures from the Passing Show.
Tree-Tops was dismantled in the 1950s, its individual orangutans displayed in the World of Mammals Hall until 1999, when they were taken down and put into storage. If you saw the apes now, you'd think the taxidermy was crude, and you'd be right. The top taxidermists at the WTC today could sculpt a far more realistic and technically accurate primate—that is to say, one that was fleshier and less grotesquely savage. At the time, however, Hornaday's experiment was radical, equivalent to adding Technicolor to The Wizard of Oz.
Even so, it was the live animals that truly captured Hornaday's heart. "I love nature and all her works but one day in an East Indian jungle among strange men and beasts, is worth more to me than a year among dry specimens," he wrote in 1885.
In spite of Hornaday's breakthrough display, that year the SAT dissolved, mired in debt. Its third and last exhibit received mixed reviews: apparently some mounts showed a bit too much imagination—as if the mirrors held up to nature were from a fun house. By then, its remaining officers found the organization too unwieldy to manage; although everyone wanted to win ribbons, only a few would share their secret formulas and methods.
The SAT was far from a failure, though. Hornaday, for one, claimed that it had grandly served its purpose and was therefore no longer necessary. In fact, its most gifted members, such as Carl Akeley and Frederic Lucas, had already taken positions with the leading natural history museums, erecting astonishing dioramas unrivaled to this day. The era of "stuffing" animals, Hornaday later remarked, was finally over.
Nearly ninety years later, in 1976, an optimistic Kish sent out a thousand invitations to his first Taxidermy Review Show; 125 taxidermists responded. The show was a success, and Kish organized his second competition the following year. This show featured an awards banquet held at the Denver Playboy Club. Difficult as it was to surpass sexy women in bunny ears displaying ample decolletage and mounted animals, the newly formed National Taxidermists Association, which had initially rejected the very idea of competitive taxidermy, decided to hold its own competition, also in Denver. Kish competed in this show, too, taking Best of Show with a mounted bobcat. Undaunted, he also ran his Taxidermy Review Show for another four years.
Meanwhile, a paint company executive named Bob Williamson had decided that competitive taxidermy was more fun than selling taxidermy paint, so he set out to host his own competition, which he boldly called the World Taxidermy Championships. Soon he had copyrighted the name and the competition categories. (Try passing yourself off as a World Taxidermy Champion, and you just might get sued!) The first WTC took place in 1983, drawing nearly three hundred taxidermists, including a few competitors from Canada and Europe.
In 1994, however, Williamson sold the WTC to a former schoolteacher named Larry Blomquist, who—together with his wife, Kathy (whom he poached from Taxidermy Today magazine)—has run it (and Breakthrough magazine) ever since.
Many participants asked me why I was at the WTC. They found it incomprehensible that someone who was not a taxidermist, a hunter, or a zoologist would find taxidermy so intriguing. The subtle shame lived on, even here among the elite. Usually this was manifested by self-deprecating humor—humming "Dueling Banjos" from Deliverance, for instance, or claiming that one's genetic makeup contained the "Taxidermy gene" ("T gene" for short)—a propensity to procrastinate. Some taxidermists went so far as to compare themselves to serial killers—an industry cliché based on the belief that as kids, serial killers abused their pets. (Jeffrey Dahmer did consider taxidermy as a profession, and he did skin dogs.) Several of the taxidermists who had attended college or graduate school wanted it known. Others spoke of children and grandchildren who were now enrolled. A woman whose husband was a bird judge told a story that epitomized the unease felt by the entire field. When her daughter was in third grade, her teacher asked what her father did for a living. The eight-year-old mumbled, "He's a taxidermist."
"A tax attorney?" asked the teacher.
"Oh, yes!" said the daughter with relief.
***
"The fine arts never respected taxidermy and never will," Kish told me. "If you take five of the best sculptors who ever lived and ask them to sculpt something, you'll get five different results. If you ask the five best taxidermists in the world to mount a white-tailed deer, aside from some stylistic differences, they'll all pretty much look like white-tailed deer. We're trying to duplicate something that nature already created. It's kind of like medical illustration."
Jack Fishwick, a tall, thin, bespectacled taxidermist from England who works for natural history museums throughout Europe and whose specialty is birds ("small birds"), was far more blunt: "Even though I do it, I think it is totally weird. Bizarre! It's a pointless exercise, because it will never be perfect. No matter how good you are, you'll only get a semblance of life. It'll never be alive again. A sculptor can make things soft and flowing to give the impression of speed or agility, but a taxidermist is restricted to re-creat[ing] nature exactly."
By day two, the Crowne Plaza was a fourteen-story Wunderkammer. The grand ballroom contained 701 competition mounts. The seminar rooms hosted live taxidermy demonstrations—the zoological equivalent of Thomas Eakins's painting The Gross Clinic. And many of its 288 hotel rooms were inhabited by beasts and birds that looked freshly plucked from the forest or the tundra or the veldt. This presented something of a challenge to the hotel staff, who suffered random encounters with snarling effigies, a series of unintentional practical jokes.
One day after lunch, I stopped by my room to make a call. The door was open and the housekeeper was making my bed, so I stood outside with the floor supervisor, a twenty-five-year-old from Lima, Peru. When I asked him what he made of all this, his eyes brightened and he said, "The housekeepers called me a few time: 'Someone has to come and open the door for me because there's a tiger!' They get scared of small snakes." He pointed down the hall. "The housekeeper over there—we told her to be careful of room number 615. There's a big anaconda in there from Peru."
Ken Walker stood in a packed conference room preparing to give his talk, "Competition Techniques and Strategies." As people searched for seats, he arranged a bear skull and two sets of plastic jaws (cougar and bobcat) on a long table. The "jaw sets" resembled wind-up toys—pink-gummed dentures that chatter across your desk. He was using them to animate his talk—not that he needs props to enliven his speaking. Like Hornaday, Walker can hold a crowd captive. He's a world-class talent and a Smithsonian taxidermist; everyone here wanted to know how to sculpt forms the Ken Walker way, which is to say with grace, speed, and accuracy.
"Why even compete? It's a waste of money," he began in his Canadian accent. "Really, isn't it the person who has the most green ribbons who wins? I realized early on in my career that I wouldn't be rich. So why not be famous? I've never taken the safe road. You learn nothing from winning. But those third-place ribbons taught me a lot." As he talked, his hands were shaping a tiny marten out of warm gray clay. He's been working with clay since he was a kid fascinated with Claymation movies. "Okey-dokey. This is my therapy since they let me out. I couldn't get that needlepoint down." He's only halfjoking, because later in his talk he would compare taxidermy to flower arranging. It's the same thing—an obsessive fabrication of microhabitats.
Like a coach, he spoke in platitudes:
"Procrastination is justification for failure."
"You have no control over your competition."
"A piece is never finished—you can groom it until all the hair's gone."
"I strive for the artistic over the technical, but you're looking for the perfect marriage of both."
"A judge spends on average [of] ten minutes for each bird, and you spent an entire year."
"I've never mounted a piece for a judge in my life. I mount everything for myself."
The crowd was writing furiously. "To win at the highest level, you want to make your own jaw sets," he said, holding polyurethane cougar fangs in his right hand and fake bobcat teeth in his left. With snarling jaws in each of his hands and, of course, his own straight white teeth, he resembled a three-headed demon casting an evil spell. His next topic was how to soak, freeze, cast, and pickle tongues. "There's nothing worse than paint on a tongue," he said. "I feel like I can taste it."
As he finished, the elevator across the hall opened to let someone off. Inside, Ray Hatfield was riding down to the ballroom. He raised a friendly hand. Next to him, on a brass baggage cart, was his radiant snow leopard.
The World Show is not a survival-of-the-fittest event, but something of a twisted 4-H fair, where teams of scrutinizing judges holding dental mirrors and penlights examine mounts from nearly every phylum and order for anatomical accuracy and artistic merit. Using an official score sheet—a checklist, really—of competition criteria, they determine a total score. The life-size mammal score sheet, for instance, has 139 items, including correct use of paint for nose interior; appearance of seams; cleanliness (bloodstains); odor (strong animal smell or "raw" rancid smell); fullness of lips; tail area (sex organ); and inner ear anatomy. Twelve Best in World titles and numerous first-, second-, and third-place ribbons are awarded during the show. Anyone from its four divisions (Master, Professional, Novice, and Freeze-Dry) can win the Carl E. Akeley Award. Though named for the most famous taxidermist ever, the prize has the less lofty purpose of proving that "taxidermy is indeed a valid form of wildlife art."
It was six P.M. Wednesday, the start of the competition. When I entered the ballroom, an official manning the door eyed me suspiciously, until he noticed my shiny black staff badge (given to me by the show's promoters) and motioned me in. To the right, an entire wall was covered with deer heads—facing up, down, and all around (each one subtly different, but they all looked the same to me). To the left, nothing but porcelaneous fishes. Throughout the ballroom, hundreds of mounts jockeyed for position under glimmering chandeliers. A quick scan revealed Hatfield's monstrous lion; Cally Morris's gobblers; an Alaskan lynx; a muskrat and a green sandpiper pondside; a Gaboon viper with a tarantula and scorpion; a snow-covered snarling coyote; a porcupine climbing up a frost-covered tree; and, over in Re-Creations, Walker's fake panda. Although the black-footed ferret and the ring-tailed lemur are officially considered endangered, nothing, I was told over and over, was poached or smuggled. "You get caught, you're dead meat," said one official.
Farther inside, a lime green chameleon snared beetles with its long translucent tongue, and three crows happily roosted in a pumpkin patch. A garish pink tongue the size of a tube of toothpaste emerged from the woolly face of a bison. The bison was attempting to lick its own nose, a naturalistic moment that caught the judges' attention. "I love the tongue! It's awesome," enthused mammal judge Wendy Christensen-Senk, a taxidermist with the Milwaukee Public Museum. "Look at that tongue!" crowed another judge. The chameleons inspired similar remarks. Although the judging had just begun, I could tell the bison was a top contender.
Each mount was like a song by an enthusiastic, if sometimes off-key, singer. Walker compared taxidermy to karaoke, and when you think about it he's right: each animal was some taxidermist's passionate attempt at mimicry. The hooded crow perched on a gargoyle of Charles Darwin was a British taxidermist's ode to evolutionary science. An Osceola turkey in the snapping jaws of an alligator depicted a rare scene from Florida's swamps. Some mounts were weird stabs at humor: for example, two mandarin ducks with a plaque (engraved!) that said you the man. More bizarre still were the truncated beasts. The howling coyote with a mini-World Trade Center wreckage built into its eviscerated furry torso was especially confounding. Bearing the title Predator Who Survives, the coyote had been sawed in half and turned into a shrine.
Several mounts entered by foreign participants were like national anthems. The Russian competing with a Siberian sturgeon was one case in point. But no mount evoked its country of origin as distinctly as a Swiss participant's minnow-size fish. With chronographic precision, the display—an aquarium lit with high-tech fiber optics disguised as aquatic plants—was accompanied by a thick binder documenting the laborious process of how one transforms a real fish into an exact replica. I couldn't help but wonder just how long it would take this exhibitor to tackle, say, a whale shark.
Although everyjudge knew certain basics (bobcats attack from the ground, leopards from high up in trees), some mounts required more specialized knowledge. And for these, Christensen-Senk had her own reference files. At one point, she grabbed a photo of a groundhog and was able to bust a participant who was attempting to pass off a porcupine made from a groundhog manikin. (Porcupines have super-long quills, which can hide imperfections. Christensen-Senk noticed the flawed profile in a nanosecond.) Sniffing the ibex while running her hands up and down its furry frame, she said, "It smells like an ibex. I like the pose, but it's a commercially available pose." She held the participants to rigid standards, knowing which parts were purchased and which hand-cast. Nearby, John Matthews, from the Smithsonian, shined his flashlight down a white-tailed deer's throat and said, "Look how bumpy it is at the base." Anything with an open mouth was simply howling for scrutiny, and variations of Matthews's comment echoed throughout the ballroom.
While the mammal judges examined tongues for taste buds, inner nostrils for septums, and backsides for anuses, I tagged along with the bird judges, whose visual dissections were somehow less invasive. (As Kish told me, bird taxidermists are usually expert naturalists because they go outdoors and closely study bird behavior.) Bird taxidermists are, for the most part, birders. However, whereas birders tend to seek out rarity, bird taxidermists are interested primarily in common species: nuanced archetypes. Tagging along with the bird judges felt a lot like walking through a nature preserve, although it's much easier to spot a clapper rail in a ballroom than in an overgrown salt marsh. The five judges moved in a flock from bird to bird, troubled by unsightly covet feathers, crude eye rings, and other misdemeanors. Although I hadn't seen many of the species before, a bird book was unnecessary. The judges—one of whom had memorized every single Latin species name—were five walking field guides, and I jotted down their comments.
ROCK PTARMIGAN: "The left eye is off."
NORTHERN SHOVELER: "No detail in the mandible. He's not aerodynamic. Secondary wings are distorted."
AMERICAN WIDGEON: "I like the drop of the crop and the flatness of the wings. Each wing is a unit working. I like the rump."
EASTERN WILD TURKEY: "It's the plastic foliage I find so disturbing. But it's a damn good turkey."
ANOTHER TURKEY: "This turkey here, he's after that grasshopper. He's got attitude!"
CAPERCAILLIE: "Exposed wires in the Master Division is a no-no."
MALLARD: "Silly duck!"
WATERFOWL: "Looks like they've walked here from Chicago! Waterfowl have sleek, feminine feet."
The bird judges argued and squawked until their eyes landed on a mount that left everyone speechless. It wasn't something regal and symbolic like a bald eagle or exotic like a brilliantly plumed macaw, but two English tree sparrows, one protecting its nest from the other: a subtle narrative with a delightful mise en scène. Bird droppings indicated that the sparrows inhabited the area. A feather in one sparrow's beak animated the process of building a nest. Crouching down to see it from all sides, the judges detected not a single flaw. "The sideshow is three hundred sixty degrees," they agreed, gazing into the little world before them as if it were alive. The sparrows, lovingly preserved by Uwe Bauch of Ammelshain, Germany, exemplified the category. In fact,
they exemplified the show.
It was nearly midnight when I opened my notebook and read the list of birds I had seen. As I wondered aloud whether I could add a few species to my life list, the British bird judge Jack Fishwick snapped, "This is a death list! You can add them to your death list!"
In the morning, my eyes ached, my mind was reeling, and I understood why taxidermists use the word "anatomical" to describe each other—as in "He's getting too anatomical." I had had enough anatomical minutiae for now—maybe forever. But I still hadn't been down to the taxidermy trade fair—the subterranean world where you can buy products and services that may, on the surface, seem illegal, immoral, or haltingly bizarre: lion pelts with intact claws, whiskers, tails, and manes; chicken feet injection fluid; frozen raccoons ($50 each); artificial coyote throats; mink teeth; fish eye sockets; fox urine; and tanned sable scrotums ($7.50 apiece).
The first thing that caught my attention was a live demonstration that had attracted a crowd of spectators. A taxidermist in blue surgical gloves was sewing the cape of a big-horned aoudad sheep, a species normally found in northern Africa. (This one had died at an exotic-game ranch in Texas or Missouri.) Answering questions as he drew a threaded needle through its skin, he could have been demonstrating how to operate a new car or refrigerator. I watched for a bit, amazed and bewildered. Then wandered down an aisle, passing rows and rows of polyurethane deer, boar, and bear manikins resembling yellow fetuses, until I came upon a freeze-dried monkey holding a tiny, hand-lettered sign that said FREEZE DRY YOUR PETS! I quickly moved on. At the end of the row, shoppers at a booth of tanned pelts peeled back skins one by one as if they were broadloom carpet samples.
Still Life Page 6
