Still Life

by Melissa Milgrom

  Plus, I had heard that after the opening of the new hall, the museum might shut down the lab. This might be the end of taxidermy on a grand scale at the Smithsonian. It might be the end for John Matthews. It felt like the right historic moment to be here.

  In twenty minutes, we were at the lab. The taxidermists, who were putting in ten- to twelve-hour days to make the deadline, had been at work since six A.M. Their official hours were six A.M. to four P.M., Monday through Thursday, but lately they had been working every day. "We've done ninety percent of the skinning and seventy-five percent of the mounts," Matthews said, leading me inside the cool cement-block warehouse.

  The lab was monstrous: fifty thousand square feet of taxidermy divided into three huge rooms. The front room had the computer, a sofa, a coffee table, and an immature giraffe in a gantry (posed for a water hole group). Boxes and crates lined the walls. Inside any given crate might be the rare skin of a black-footed ferret or the world's largest moose. For the past two years, the most amazing creatures had been arriving from zoos, primate labs, and research centers around the world. The skins came in plastic coolers and FedEx boxes; they came packaged in huge wooden crates and foam-lined containers. Medium-size mammals—frozen raccoons and lemurs—were shipped overnight in coolers with hinged lids. One time, a primate lab forgot to include a colobus monkey's detached head and had to send it express the next day.

  Beyond that room was the actual workshop, and past the workshop was a twenty-five-thousand-square-foot storage area containing shelves upon shelves of trophies (private donations) and historical mounts extricated from old dioramas. Imagine Ikea if Ikea sold only stuffed animals.

  A museum storeroom is a sad and spectacular place to see. Only when you walk past shelves loaded with Galápagos tortoises, black-maned lions, elephant skulls and rows of stiff domestic dogs, huge vipers from the 1800s, and the first preserved gorillas can you begin to grasp the incomprehensible slaughter committed by museums whose lust for nature in the form of collecting expeditions was boundless. While researching this book, I was exceptionally lucky to tour the British Natural History Museum's Wandsworth facility in south London with fish curator Oliver Crimmen (who periodically visits the animals so that they aren't forgotten). It's a humongous, maximum-security, climate-controlled animal morgue. Each specimen—there are thousands—is a death as well as a reincarnated life lovingly preserved by some taxidermist at a given point in time. They are frozen records, dilapidated facsimiles, time capsules of vanished worlds, testaments to an era when British imperialism dominated the race to acquire the most "type specimens" (the archetype, the standard to which all others are measured) for its national collections. Wandsworth is a heart-rending record of what humans are capable of doing when they love something too much.

  Before we entered the workshop, Matthews checked his e-mail. He was visibly on edge, and everyone knew why. The big opening was in mid-November—only four months away—and four months is nothing in taxidermy.

  Except for the stars-and-stripes button-down shirt he had worn to judge mounts at the World Show, I had only ever seen him in a Smithsonian shirt. The Smithsonian sun logo appeared on his chest day after day, like a sailor's tattoo of a heart with the word mom in the center. He owns around two dozen Smithsonian shirts; the one he had on that day was red.

  Matthews grew up in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and has a strong Yankee accent and a New Englander's reserve. He is broad-shouldered and muscular, with clear blue eyes, thick graying brown hair, and a prominent handlebar mustache that brings to mind a daguerreotype.

  Matthews mounted his first specimen, a rabbit, in an after-school program when he was thirteen. "I just liked to see how things came apart and went back together," he said. "I've always liked animals. I loved nature, loved to watch it ... It's strange. I just kept picking up animals that were hit on the side of the road, and then people started bringing me things to mount." For a while, he ran his own taxidermy studio on Cape Cod. He's also worked at a nuclear power plant and spent some time building ships. Sometimes rich hunters hired him to accompany them to places such as Spain, Africa, and Argentina, so that he could demonstrate how to properly skin their kills. "In the taxidermy trade, I've never worked for anyone else except the Smithsonian," he said.

  In twenty-nine years as a taxidermist, his sole ambition has been to preserve animals—exactly. "I'm not going to change nature," he says. "We don't know anything about life systems, but [we do know] everything that supports the musculature."

  Matthews, himself a championship taxidermist, holds competitions in high regard because they provide standards in an otherwise unregulated field. Whereas most European taxidermists must pass a practical exam and serve as an apprentice before they can work commercially, in the United States generally all a taxidermist has to do is pay a nominal fee to the state fish and wildlife department and show someone there a mount or two. That said, no title in the taxidermy world ranked higher than lead taxidermist at the Smithsonian Institution.

  Matthews's salary was $58,000, half of what he says the same work would have brought in commercially. Still, the honor far eclipsed the money. "It's a prestigious job and a legacy. A commercial taxidermist doesn't have the time for details, but a museum taxidermist should be as flawless as possible. The anatomy should be perfect; all the nasal and inner ear detail, all the idiosyncrasies should be as close to perfect and anatomically accurate as possible," he said. "I just spent a week and a half on the koala bear. I'd never spend that much time on a commercial mount."

  The gigantic workshop was sparkling clean, with super-high ceilings lit with long fluorescent tubes. Long worktables spread with specialized equipment and anatomy books were equipped with ventilation hoods for sucking out toxic fumes given off by the Bondo and lacquer the taxidermists used. But most prominent were the animals. Strikingly beautiful, some mounts were more than one hundred years old; others were rare and exotic endangered species, hardly any examples of which still exist in the wild. They leaped and yawned, stretched and drooled, nursed their young and showed off their defining features. The towering Russian brown bear on hind legs looked as if it remembered how it got here and wanted revenge. The arched-backed clouded leopard flaunted its sharp canines and papillae-studded tongue—weapons it used to devour its mates, thereby ensuring its status as the most endangered wild cat. Matthews shined a flashlight into its custom-made eyes; they gleamed like roadside reflectors.

  The room radiated the energy of 274 animals representing four continents telling the story of evolution. The smallest, the feathertail glider (an extremely rare marsupial from Australia), had already been skinned (by Matthews, in front of research scientists) and mounted. The largest, the fifteen-foot reticulated giraffe (now a pile of foam parts and a frozen pelt), had to be assembled on-site in Washington, the only way the giraffe would fit through the door.

  Matthews led me deeper into the lab, introducing me to the mounts as if they were childhood friends. I envied his ability to feel so deeply for each species. We passed the lowland gorilla (knuckle-walking), the brush-tailed porcupine, the gray fox, and the South American tayra. Three tree kangaroos were frozen in flight, hopping across the cement floor. They made me want to hop, too.

  Matthews knew every inch of the lab. In 1997, when the museum had received a $20 million donation from California real estate developer Kenneth E. Behring for the hall, Matthews had been appointed lead taxidermist. It was an immense responsibility to help collect, refurbish, and mount 274 animals in three years, especially when you consider that the Akeley Hall of African Mammals took twenty-five years to create (and killed Akeley).

  This year the Smithsonian's secretary, Lawrence M. Small, wasn't a paleontologist or an astrophysicist, but a former Citicorp banker with no museum or academic experience. (Small resigned in 2007 after an audit showed that he had spent museum money on chauffeured cars, private jets, posh hotels, and other luxuries.) When Small took the job, he promised to "modernize everything of consequence,"
a dubious concept to research scientists and curators (literally, guardians of the collection), who feared that the Mall was becoming a mall. Soon every exhibit bore a logo: the Fujifilm Giant Panda Habitat; the O. Orkin Insect Zoo; the Lockheed Martin IMAX Theater at the National Air and Space Museum; and, most perplexing of all, a museum visitors' guide sponsored by Philips Petroleum with a back-page ad promoting oil drilling in Alaska.

  Outside funding is essential at most museums, even this one, which gets 70 percent of its annual budget from the U.S. government. Museums have always operated this way. Carl Akeley and Roy Chapman Andrews had to entice rich industrialists and other patrons to fund their expeditions, too. At the Smithsonian, however, researchers and curators feared that the private money would affect content, resulting in exhibits that are "dumbed down." In 2001, for instance, thirty-six curators at the National Museum of American History signed a protest memo saying, "Secretary Small has obligated the museum to relationships with private individuals that breach established standards of museum practice and professional ethics."

  Kenneth Behring had given more money to the Smithsonian than anyone in the museum's history. When he gave Natural History the $20 million, followed three years later by $80 million for American History, the museum was finally able to renovate its gorgeous Beaux Arts building (1910), which housed two mammal halls, World of Mammals and North American Mammals, with their habitat dioramas, and Life in the Sea, with its great blue whale.

  One reason the museum wanted the new hall was because it believed people were no longer aware that they were mammals; indeed, the museum thought, people didn't consider themselves animals at all. As the exhibition team hired outside architects and designers, it began to establish what the new hall would be about (210 years of mammal evolution), who the intended audience would be (families with children under age ten, 60 percent of its demographic), and what story to tell (in a nutshell, "Welcome to the Mammal Family Reunion. Come Meet Your Relatives!"). Mostly the hall would show the diversity of species and how mammals have adapted over time to a range of environments and climates, which, given global warming, is an incredibly important trait to highlight.

  Now the museum had to decide how to convey this. The "concept people"—a group of highly accomplished scientists, designers, writers, and curators—investigated whether, for instance, the exhibit should be based on phylogenetics or ecosystems; whether dioramas or freestanding mounts enhanced with fog machines and simulated thunder should be used. Meanwhile, Matthews, a "production person," was dispatched to Newington to outfit the lab with the best tools and equipment.

  Deciding to forgo traditional dioramas ("stagnant"; "animals in their dullest moments"), the concept people called for installations with more drama, more high-tech wizardry, and more interactive special effects, such as flip doors, pushbuttons, digitized animal sounds, and kids-only crawlspaces. This is what I believe associate director for public programs Robert Sullivan meant when he told reporters at a press conference that the new hall contained the "ooh factor" and the "gross-out factor."

  Smithsonian taxidermist Paul Rhymer explained it like this: "Kids don't give a shit about those dioramas. It's the MTV generation. They want new images, and this exhibit gives it to them. I had to be converted to that point of view. This hall treats taxidermy like sculpture. The starkness shows off the work. Or maybe I'm buying the party line. That's okay. [It's] okay to be a company man on this one."

  Once the concept people chose the environments (arctic, rain forest, temperate forest, and prairie) and their corresponding inhabitants—274 of the 5,000 known mammal species and 1 extinct one—it had to acquire the specimens. Historically, as we have seen, museums have obtained specimens by shooting them in the wild. That clearly was not going to happen here. Instead, the museum took specimens off of its own exhibits and excavated others from its dusty attic. It circulated a wish list to far-flung labs and zoos, requesting 450 additional skins and carcasses. And it acquired two amazing private collections of 250 specimens each: one from Roger Martin, a taxidermist from North Carolina, the other from Kenneth Behring.

  At seventy-four, Behring was a real estate magnate and the former owner of the Seattle Seahawks football team. He also was an internationally famous big-game hunter with more than 300 kills recorded in the official record book of the Safari Club International (the world's largest hunting lobby, which, incidentally, has its own taxidermy museum in Tucson, Arizona). Behring was not someone Walker would ever call a bunny hunter. Neither would the Humane Society or scores of other environmental organizations. When the Humane Society, for instance, got wind of Behring's donation, it posted a statement on its Web site describing the time Behring shot one of the last remaining argali sheep in existence (Kazakhstan, 1997). Instead of censuring Behring for killing an endangered species on the brink of extinction (only about one hundred existed in the wild), the Smithsonian, having just accepted the $20 million, attempted to import its trophy remains as a scientific specimen. Eventually, after much bad press and public outcry, the museum dropped the permit application.

  Because of all this, some museum people and a host of environmental groups suggested that it was unethical to accept money and trophies from someone—even a great philanthropist such as Behring—who had been seemingly indiscriminate in his choice of kills (Behring says he shot the sheep in the company of Russian scientists who wanted to study it) and that the museum was allowing him to buy his way into the exhibit. Collections manager Linda K. Gordon, the person at the Smithsonian who personally accessioned each of Behring's trophies, denied this. "Of course he was interested in seeing those specimens used [in the exhibit], but there was no stipulation of that or content," she explained to me one day by phone.

  She went on, "We were all concerned that the big-game aspect of this would make a big flap in the press, and that never happened. We were always waiting for the other shoe to fall, and [the] public programs [department] was careful to emphasize that no specimens were killed for the exhibit—and that is true—more or less—almost true."

  At that moment, it occurred to me that when all was said and done, the most controversial aspect of the new mammal hall was, ironically, its most traditional feature: it had been funded by a big-game hunter.

  The morning I visited the lab, Matthews sat at a worktable, preserving an exceptionally rare and wonderful creature: the okapi (Okapia johnstoni). Okapis are shy ruminants that live in the eastern Congo. They are equally strange and beautiful. They have a zebra's striped hind legs, an antelope's body, and a giraffe's face and long tongue. So unusual are they, in fact, that when Sir Harry Johnston brought the first okapi skin to England at the turn of the twentieth century, the Zoological Society of London thought it was a horse and classified it as Equus johnstoni. The society later articulated an actual okapi skeleton, realized it was not a horse, and reclassified it. Here in the lab, the okapi may look like a taxidermist's fanciful creation (like the jackalope), but in the forests of the eastern Congo, its shadowy brown coat camouflages it in the trees, which is how the species has survived (so far). Although scientists discovered okapis only a hundred years ago, they are already headed for extinction. Matthews treated his okapi skin like a precious jewel.

  This okapi didn't come from the Congo; it died at a California zoo. That was evident by its overgrown hooves, which would have been filed down in the wild. Captivity alters the way animals look; captive animals are rarely as beautiful as those in the wild, which is why taxidermists find them aesthetically subpar.

  "It's like masturbation versus sex," Walker explained (after he was back in Alberta and could say whatever he wanted).

  "We never got the perfect specimen [for the hall]," explained Matthews, filing. "At least half [had] had a necropsy [an animal autopsy] done on them when they showed up. All of the internal organs were removed—the eyeballs, brain, thyroid were all removed. They cut off the top of the head to take out the brain. They were cut everywhere—the head, the bottom, the sides—so re
search scientists could get a life history." Take the gorilla, for example. When it arrived via FedEx, it had no eyelids and was missing a nipple.

  It was fascinating to watch the taxidermists transform zoo captives into wild savages. For instance, zoo rodents' overgrown teeth had to be cosmetically trimmed with wire cutters to make them look as if the animals had foraged for food (when in reality they had been served take-out). Clearly, this went beyond creating the illusion of life. Instead, the taxidermists were creating the fantasy of a life never lived.

  Taxidermists as a rule dislike fiction, because they believe it's impossible to improve on what nature has already perfected. But sometimes, apparently, you can, and the taxidermists in this lab were doing just that. If William Hornaday, chief taxidermist at the Smithsonian in the 1880s, were here now, he probably would be disgusted by the condition of the skins.

  I wonder, though, if he ever encountered the following situations. To transform Behring's galloping oryx into a nursing mother, the taxidermists had to rehydrate and remount the skin, reshape its muscles, and raise its head. The threadbare sable antelope had bald patches on its rib cage, requiring skin grafts, and the immature giraffe needed replacement leg rods. Whereas Theodore Roosevelt's white rhino needed only a simple cleaning, the antique Bengal tiger's stripes had faded and needed to be painted back on with Garnier Nutrisse "Luscious Mango" hair dye. Finally, the fifteen-foot giraffe required a penile implant: twenty-five pounds of clay.