Taxidermists Craft Stories With Their Work

A bighorn sheep balances in mid-stride. A mountain goat surveys the terrain beneath its rock perch. A lioness assesses a downed zebra, both fixed forever in a tableau of survival.

This is the changing face of taxidermy.

The job is expanding from simply putting antlers on the wall. Like good art, many customers are asking taxidermists to tell a story without words.

About 75,000 Americans - most of them hobbyists or those seeking a second income - consider themselves practicing taxidermists, according to a survey by the National Taxidermists Association, based in Slidell, La.

Several decades ago, taxidermists purchased from only a handful of suppliers. Now, roughly 150 supply houses offer products that range from glass eyes that swivel to artificial underbodies that can be fashioned to almost any shape.

In many states, such as Washington, taxidermists must be licensed with the state wildlife agency and endure considerable red tape in order to mount animals for profit.

Ron Benner, a Pennsylvania taxidermist, was judged the country’s best all-around taxidermist in 1990. One of his works - a brown trout in fall spawning colors - has appeared on the cover of Taxidermy Today, a glossy trade magazine. But when Benner looks at that fish with a fresh eye, he does not bask in the reflections that bounce from its body.

Fish lose their lustrous coloration within minutes of death. Benner took photographs of his trout seconds after it was caught so he would be able to recapture its details. Though the fish - a 100-hour project painted scale by scale and positioned over two rocks in a gravel bed - seems as if it could still bolt for freedom, Benner is not satisfied with marginal particulars around its eye sockets.

“Guys like that take taxidermy to a whole new level,” said Terry Ehrlich, editor of Taxidermy Today. “For far too long, too much commercial taxidermy was an ego trip for the sportsman. He’d bring in a big bass to the taxidermist and want it mounted so it looked like it could swallow a mayonnaise jar.”

To that end, many taxidermists try to discourage customers from mounts with exaggerated poses.

“A relaxed animal is much more comfortable to be around,” Benner said.

The eyes are the window to the soul, good taxidermists say. If they’re not anatomically correct, the whole effect suffers.

In general, anatomy suffered greatly during the first days of taxidermy. The oldest known specimen is a rhinoceros, circa 1500, made for the Royal Museum of Vertebrates in Florence, Italy. Before it was sewn back on, the rhino’s skin was tanned and then stuffed with gravel.

The American Museum of Natural History in New York, established in 1791, houses some of America’s earliest works of taxidermy. Practitioners in that era boiled the bones of the animals, reassembled and wired them together, and filled the final products with excelsior.

The results, however, were often static, clinical studies devoid of expression. The work of today’s masters is anything but.

White-tailed deer are still the bread and butter of most American taxidermists. Yet the best artists realize that each one is different, with distinct hair textures.

“You can always do better,” Benner said. “The goal is to make them as lifelike as you can. How close can we come? Well, we can’t make them breathe - yet.”

And maybe they should not. But we should all look so good at the end.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo