Original subtitles

You know, you go around a cocktail party,

people say what they do.

At first they think I'm joking.

- It's somewhere between a hobby and an addiction.

Sculpting an animal is intriguing, it's fascinating.

- I was blown away by the beauty of the material.

- Taxidermists do what they do, not because they see death.

They do what they do because they see life.

I am definitely a bird addict.

Birds are just so much fun because I don't have to know the pose before I finish the bird.

It's playing, it's discovery.

I just noticed he was doing this funny little thing where his head was tilted.

And I actually kinda really like it.

I was like oh I think he wants to tilt his head.

Um I think he wants to be kinda curious.

This bird is a superb starling.

And I just really like these guys 'cause they're super dynamic,

and I can really do something kinda fun and, and funny with them.

They have these big long legs for this small bird,

and these fun little pantaloons that I want to make sure show.

These are called the tail coverts,

these little white tush feathers.

I call it the tush plush.

I like to make sure that that looks good.

Birds are design.

They are dressed up.

They look certain ways to attract each other.

And that is fashion.

- I get to study nature.

And that is the most satisfying thing in the world.

I'm from Zimbabwe, as well as South Africa.

The art of taxidermy is the combination of being an artist

and being a naturalist.

You've got to understand how to capture that expression.

I started leaning towards doing big cats.

You know, the African lion,

it's always sorta captivated me since I was a child.

You find a special bond with wildlife and animals

because you're viewing them in a different light.

It's an ongoing study.

You, you, you'll never get it right.

It'll never look real.

- We don't want to duplicate nature;

we just want to make something unique.

- All the stuff we work with is all antiques.

- We sort of make objects and taxidermy is a part of it.

It's not our main goal to reproduce an animal.

We just like to make cool stuff.

We have a history in art direction.

And when we start learning the craft of taxidermy,

we that took into it.

Instead of what you see in normal taxidermy

that it's all based on nature,

we work after the 17th century painters,

who sort of portraited these animals in a way

that all the features of those really weird animals show.

- The old masters, when they make statues,

when they portray a guy picking an apple,

he's not just doing this

but he's doing the really fancy pose, showing all his muscles.

- That's more or less what we try to do.

- Showing off,

- I don't really know what it is that makes a person

get interested in taxidermy.

I, I think you're born with it.

I was born in Switzerland.

So I like to think of myself more as a Swiss taxidermist.

I actually started doing taxidermy when I was eight years old.

So I've been doing it for 15 years now.

My parents put up with a lot.

They threatened to make me quit taxidermy several times

cause it was just overwhelming.

I was always just obsessed with leopards

Leopards have been my lifelong addiction.

I pretty much raised cubs, like grew up around leopards,

black leopards, spotted leopards.

Working at the museum, I had my hands on snow leopards,

Persian leopards, and more leopards, clouded leopards.

It's one thing to call yourself a taxidermist when you're a kid,

but when you can say you're working at a museum,

it just changes everything.

- To me, natural history museums have always been where it's at.

They're hallowed ground.

They're beautiful, studious, artistic places.

I had a corporate job in marketing,

working on computers all day long.

But I really wanted to learn taxidermy.

I went to Montana, took my vacation,

went to taxidermy school.

You know, it's just a couple week program,

but I really loved it.

And got back and was like that was awesome.

Now what do I do with any of that?

And so I looked up who was doing taxidermy at the museum.

And I happened upon Tim.

- I work at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

Been here for the last 32 years. I am the staff taxidermist.

- You know, if I could take him and put him in a diorama

to keep for all time, I would.

I feel like he's that special.

- She managed to hunt me down,

figured out how to get ahold of me.

- I just started showing up every day.

I still had my marketing job.

So I would go from 6 am to 9:30 Monday through Friday,

and I would volunteer with Tim.

I remember one day I went to work and I had mountain lion

blood on my work shirt.

So I just told people it was coffee,

but I really wanted to tell people the truth

'cause I was so proud of it.

I kinda knew then that that's what I should be doing.

So I quit my marketing job and I volunteered there full-time.

And I was so much happier.

After Allis had worked for me the second year,

she said, you know, I have sorta this dream.

- I'm the owner of Prey Taxidermy.

We are located in Los Angeles, California.

Certainly not the usual place for a taxidermy studio.

- When she told me she was gonna open her studio

Downtown Los Angeles in the Art District,

I'm like oh really?

Something I couldn't imagine.

But once again, Allis could imagine.

And it di-, it's worked.

Madison's worked with me since the Natural History Museum.

You know, we're both apprentices of Tim Bovard.

- Prior to Allis and Madison,

most of my volunteers really didn't have an interest

in working with dead stuff.

- Right now, I am skinning an ermine.

And uh it's fairly delicate work.

I've never actually skinned one of these, but I have 11 to do.

laughs] So I'm sure I'll become very familiar with them.

Skinning is truly my favorite part of this whole process

I love seeing the insides and the anatomy of things.

Me and Allis are definitely museum trained.

We pay more attention to making the final mount

be more true to what the animal was in life.

- Based on the education that Tim gave me,

I mean that was free art school. That was free history.

That was free science.

You know, and he's a zoologist.

And then that's the viewpoint that I got.

- To be the best, to really do really high level work,

you can't be willing to settle.

You need to be able to look at something and go

this could be better or how could I do that better?

You do have to be nuts,

and not just because you're playing with dead things.

You have to be a special kind of obsessive compulsive

uh mixed with an artist sensibility.

That's where you get that idea of the, the tortured artist,

you know?

Maybe you do end up like Van Gogh

and cut off your ear or whatever.

But to be fair, a taxidermist, if we cut off our ear,

at least we'd make something out of it.

- We were fed up with advertising because in the end,

you're not the boss over your own work.

In the end, somebody who pays will say

no I want to change this and I want you to do that.

So when we started this,

it was the first thing we sort of agreed on.

We're gonna do exactly what we think is good,

and we're gonna take as much time as it needs,

as much money as it needs.

Then we come up with a price,

and then we will see if somebody wants to pay for it.

So it was a big gamble.

- Our work works best in a great environment.

So when the museum called,

we were thrilled because it was just the right place.

The exhibit is called Tier,

which is the German word for animal

The whole exhibition is in this beautiful house.

We photographed all the rooms in the house

and see what'll work for each room.

One of the themes of when they build houses like this was to

incorporate nature into the house.

- They loved flowers, they loved animals.

It was a big thing in that time.

You think they need a dramatic pose

to show that they are talking to each other. So you have to...

- Yes.

- The lines like this,

he's looking at him and he's looking there.

- It's all about expressions, this one.

This is like sort of catwalk,

parading in their poses and the colors,

being as fancy as possible.

What painters use to make stories in paint,

we use the taxidermy for.

And it's like what you normally see with taxidermists,

making a little story out of nature,

but more like a fairytale.

We put an extra large jaw in a lower jaw just to emphasize

the greed he has on the eye.

He caught one. That's not enough.

He's totally focused on the one who got away.

When we made his mouth bigger, you feel more that he wants it.

A traditional taxidermist would never do that.

Yeah he would measure it and he would say

this can't be anything else.

But for us, it helps for the story.

- Growing up in Ohio, being homeschooled

let me have a lot of free time off.

So I did a lot of hunting and trapping

and photographing nature in the woods.

Neither of my parents hunted or really even had any pets

I mean just not really animal lovers.

So I was really the black sheep in the family.

My first passion was always live animals.

My mom tells this story where I was like five years old

and she took me to the Cleveland Museum.

And she said I started crying and wanted to go to the zoo

because everything there was dead.

And now I go to the zoo and I'm like I,

I might get my hands on you when you die.

This'll be the fourth black leopard I've worked on

and it's by far the best one.

Isn't that beautiful?

Most people never even heard of a black leopard before.

That's kinda what the whole point of this right now is,

to preserve it and have it end up in a museum,

so that people can enjoy it and see it, and learn from it.

My grandpa had a private zoo here in Ohio.

He rescued a bunch of animals.

And he had this one for like 17 years.

It's really neat having leopards when you're a kid growing up,

on your grandpa's zoo, and you can just watch 'em.

There's these little flaps on either side of the claw

that need to be opened up.

That's what gives it that really awesome look.

I think this is when my parents started to get a little worried.

I'd get on my bike and I would ride around town

and look for roadkill.

And I still have a vivid me-, I'm like six, seven years old,

and I remember being kind of embarrassed about it.

So I'd make sure, like I would wait sometimes half an hour.

Like I'd just ride back and forth down the street

'til there were no cars around.

Like I didn't want any witnesses.

And as soon as there was a break in traffic,

I'd like jump off my bike, like put some gloves on,

throw this thing in a bag,

and then ride to the woods somewhere, bury it,

and just like put a rock there, and come back,

you know,

couple months later and dig it up, clean all the bones.

When I made the transition into taxidermy,

I was like eight and a half, going on nine.

and that's when I took everything home

and started doing it in the basement.

I saw one of my mom's friends pulling her aside

and like whispering in her ear like

this kid needs like professional help.

When I was 14, I got involved with

the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

And that really like opened up a floodgate of doors.

Shortly after that,

I started traveling around the country,

working with different taxidermists.

Traveled and worked in 37 different shops

now in five countries.

So I just had this amazing opportunity to work

with so many different talented artists,

and really learn a lot.

To do really good taxidermy from start to finish,

I mean you have to know everything

from like a scientific collecting viewpoint.

You have to start with a real living animal.

That's the first thing about taxidermy.

And once it dies,

you have a pretty short window of opportunity

to do good quality taxidermy on it.

The actual physical act of taking the animal apart,

skinning and preserving and fleshing and salting and tanning.

That's where they actually chemically alter

skin into actual leather, like this.

This is 100% leather with fur on it.

And then once it's tanned, you gotta have a form to put it on.

The form is like a taxidermy mannequin of the animal.

This here is a form for this leopard head.

And I sculpted it starting with a real leopard skull.

Then you basically glue, pin, adjust,

taxi the skin over the sculpture.

It's an awesome feeling to walk out into nature

and see an animal and it tips over dead,

and you can take it from that very moment

'til it's on display in a museum.

And you do every single thing,

even making the eyeballs,

casting your own teeth.

It's definitely art.

- The art of taxidermy, to me, it's not so much having animals

in these weird and fantastic poses

and moving and jumping and leaping.

And that's different. That's creative.

That's telling a story.

But the art of taxidermy is to do all

of that but highly accurately.

What we're starting to see in today's day and age

is a lot more artistic work being created.

And that hasn't quite reached the shores of Africa yet.

I'm here in the States for a few months,

traveling around and visiting museums,

working on special projects with colleagues and friends of mine.

It's inspiring to meet these people.

They're so knowledgeable

about all these different parts of the industry.

It's humbling just to sit and watch.

In South Africa,

we didn't really have specialized products that come from the States.

So you just sort of compromise by figuring out

alternative ways of doing it using product that you can

pick up at a hardware store.

A lot of what I've learned is sort of self-taught.

I walked out of high school and I stepped straight into a job.

I started just at the bottom.

By just observation, you learn how to do the basics.

A lot of it came from instruction from magazines

and things like that.

And I was wondering why our work

never looked as good as in the catalogues.

And it hit me that the forms that they're using

have all this detail sculpted into them, and ours didn't.

I picked up some clay and took a skull

and started putting back the muscles onto the face

and onto the head.

It was just very trial and error-based.

Thinking back, you know, South Africa,

I always wondered what is it gonna be like, you know,

when you get to see these halls

with these great animals everywhere.

And uh it's magical.

Some of those dioramas,

the actual scenery that they're portraying

has been developed or destroyed.

So they're almost like little time capsules.

- Vanderbilt had the ultimate cabinet of curiosity.

This grand mansion is filled

with just these incredible pieces of taxidermy, dioramas.

You cannot replace taxidermy

as a tool for learning about nature and natural history.

One of the greatest things we like to see

is when kids walk up to the glass on the dioramas,

you know, wow, do, are they, are they really this big?

You know, do they really look like that?

Is the hair really that texture?

You can't get that from anything else.

Taxidermy is an art form.

So you're going to see this really broad

variety of taxidermy quality.

In natural history museums, I think it must be scientifically accurate.

In my opinion, you must still be a field naturalist.

You're really recreating these animals i-, in a scientific way.

Taxidermy is a wonderful tool for

archiving a species that no longer exists.

Lonesome George was the last Pinta Island tortoise.

He was uh living in captivity for 40 years

on the Darwin Research Center on Galapagos.

They did everything they could to try to get him to reproduce

and it just never happened.

He unfortunately died.

And w-, they decided quickly at that time

that they wanted to preserve George.

It was absolutely a, a dream come true experience.

To work with these people just opened my eyes

to the effort that goes into protecting a species.

I mean we dealt with people that were studying him for 40 years.

You know, they would talk to you,

and they would say things like well, well George would,

would do this on certain days, or he held his head this way.

Or when he was happy to see you, he acted like this.

When he didn't want to be disturbed.

You're dealing with, with um a personality.

This needed to be more than a taxidermy piece.

This was rebuilding a subject that everyone knew intimately.

They knew every wrinkle on George.

I said to myself

if I screw this up, this'll be the last piece I ever do.

To see the people from Galapagos

come to New York when he was on exhibit

and see him for the first time with tears in their eyes

was just the most emotional thing for me.

And I got a little gift from George's keeper.

He carved this little tortoise out of local wood

and sent it up here to give to me

And I held it that night, and I'm like this is like my Oscar.

This is as good as it gets.

We get so involved in these pieces.

It's this pouring out of everything, every fiber of your being.

You're feeling the highs, the lows, the anxiety,

every emotion you could possibly go through as an artist

being poured into this piece,

and hopefully this euphoric moment at the end.

In this studio that you sit in, I've spilled my blood,

my sweat, and my tears, literally.

And, and that's okay. And, and I'm, I'm good with that.

Because every time I get to that point where I think

I've been completely broken, I think of Akeley.

I think of Akeley, what he's gone through, what he's done.

And then you just pick yourself up and you just keep going.

Carl Akeley. He's the father of modern taxidermy.

- I think I first found out about Carl Akeley

when I was doing research.

Some article or book I was reading, it mentioned this,

the famous taxidermist, Carl Akeley,

who had once strangled a leopard with his bare hands.

And so I made a little note to look into that later.

I realized that there was more than enough

for a whole book on him.

I mean the thing that intrigued me the most was

like oh this is a great story about an artist,

just going to that much trouble being that obsessed.

- Carl Akeley was the man who said

we need to really elevate this art form

from creating these animals with mediocre anatomy

into these great sculptures.

The American Museum of Natural History,

where he has the Hall of African Mammals,

you know, he created a monumental piece of art.

It would take three or four years

to work on one elephant at a time.

- To read about Akeley from the time I was a child,

that work in the American Museum of Natural History

was always my inspiration.

He was basically the first one to really create

this clay sculpted form of the anatomy of the animal,

and use that as the mannequin for the piece.

- I think my first impression of Akeley was as,

it was like a Tim Burton kind of character, you know, like morbid and dark.

Johnny Depp would be like the perfect Akeley, just kind of zany.

I loved the preposterous amount of work

that he had to go to to make his work.

- You know, you're literally traveling to Africa in 1900,

which is like a ship ride.

And then once he would be there,

he would have a small army of painters and sculptors

and then like 150 native African porters

carrying tons of their equipment with them,

just so he could do his art.

Any animal he would kill,

he was trying to work like a scientist and an artist,

and he was incredibly meticulous

about all the measurements and sketching.

And then he would make these little clay maquettes.

Prior to Akeley,

a diorama might just be the animal inside the box.

He had the finest landscape painters

that were alive at the time to paint the backgrounds.

And those painters themselves would go on these infinite expeditions,

recreating the plants and getting the exact species of flora.

During that period,

part of the big shift in conservation has to do with

scientists' revelation about ecology,

and what that term really means,

which is that everything is interrelated.

Habitat became just as important as the animal.

- To get that leaf to really look like a leaf,

or to get that rock to really look like a real rock,

you really gotta know what that rock looks like.

When we do a diorama here,

we want it to be that particular place.

- The museum where I work, Carl Akeley started there.

So we have what some people consider

the world's first diorama.

We have the muskrat group.

It was done in 1890 and it was innovative at the time.

They had a cutaway view of the underwater house.

I am the only full-time taxidermist in a museum,

with the exception of Tim Bovard, that I am aware of.

There's over 5000 mounted animals in our museum.

So it's really a fun job because I'm never bored.

I started the job when I was 19.

I just want to try to share my love for nature with other people,

and have people appreciate the animals as much as I do.

A lot of people that are my age or older

started with the Northwestern School of Taxidermy

correspondence course by mail.

And we did that because there wasn't much out there.

There was not videotapes. There was not seminars

Taxidermy was a tight-lipped closed community.

Nobody told anybody their secrets.

Now, it's this wonderful sharing of information.

Competitions have just opened that field up.

- We come together for competitions, which are our conference.

And everyone's just so excited to meet each other.

We all live in these different far-flung places.

So we're the oddballs, we're the outcasts,

we're the weird ones, right.

- Uh yeah go into a bar and try and pick up a girl

uh and then you tell them you're a taxidermist.

You get some weird reactions.

You get anything from you do taxes to uh that's really creepy,

or you get the ones that lie and are like no it's not creepy at all.

Um and then in the back of their mind,

they're like this guy could be Ted Bundy.

- I'm a 3D wildlife artist.

That goes over a lot better on the first date than being like

yeah I stuff dead things.

- It ' s hard to get away from the stereotypes.

This is not embalming. This is not a dried head.

- People love to talk about Psycho,

you know,

- Obviously everyone thinks, you know,

a taxidermist is, you know, a big guy,

older, wearing camo, beard,

with a bloodlust of some kind,

you know,

and a bunch of dead deer and stuff in the back of his truck.

And while you'll certainly find people who look like that,

if you talk to 'em for just a minute, they're an artist,

and they're people that you wouldn't think in a million years

would be my friends, but they are.

- You find people from all walks of life and from all over the world,

and we have this really closely knit community

of eccentric weirdos that like to recreate nature.

- As you can see, the hocks go in.

So now I'm kinda following that line there.

- When you go to these shows, the seminars are just fantastic.

I like to teach a lot of uh the fundamentals

of the work, and building something from nothing.

So what I'm doing is I want to feel here wi-,

I'm gonna drop the scapulas down

and I'm gonna feel underneath where the spine'll be sitting.

The animal's dead, now what?

You know, what do you do with it?

You ' ve gotta try and create an attitude

with the body that tells the story you're trying to create.

It ' s gonna freeze.

It's gonna start getting stiffer as it freezes.

- When I get to go to a competition,

it gives me that chance to learn again.

You know, I really wasn't part of the taxidermy community before.

So I met all these amazing people

that were so eager to share knowledge.

- I tend to use products that you can pick

up in any hardware store for very cheap,

harvesting as much information from that specimen as possible

and recreating that to bring it to life.

- Competitions have made quite a huge difference

in the quality of taxidermy.

It's just amazing the leaps and bounds

when people start sharing.

- Overall visual appearance and attitude.

- Overall vi-, is, is very good.

- This is how I learned a lot competing,

was following the judges around.

When, when we have the critiquing,

I think that's probably

where I have learned more than anything.

- I have been a taxidermist for a lot of years,

professionally for almost 40.

So I do a lot of traveling around and, and judging,

designing product and things like that.

You can put uh neck rolls slightly overdone.

The competition taxidermy world can get you the attention,

if you're good enough.

If you're able to put those pieces together and win,

uh you can create a brand, you know.

And then they want you for sculpting product.

This is that blue foam that's a floatation billet foam.

I carve whole bears out of it all the time.

So you can see that we've got a good start to our,

our template for our mannequin.

I specialize in mostly life-size displays,

like bears, wolves, and big things.

Re-creations as well, re-creations of extinct animals,

rare endangered animals.

In re-creations,

you can use any kinda materials to create an animal,

as long as the materials are not from that animal itself.

When I did the panda bear,

that was the first time I won a World Taxidermy Championship

with a re-creation.

That was when I realized that I was kind of onto something.

I'm interested

in knowing where the limits are to what I can do.

- Staub. Dust.

These are 17th century frames.

We tried to add a classical touch

to the more modern images.

It's actually a part of the process.

After you skin the animal, you have to wash it.

And that's at a certain point,

we saw what sort of romantic feeling it got.

It's sort of a water ballet.

- Mandy.

- Yeah these are mainly males, I think, yeah.

Are these all stomachs?

Yeah, this is a cow stomach.

I wonder how she does this.

- I heard she's totally grossed out by it,

but she has to make it.

Can't imagine, yeah. Maybe it's inside out.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah it's ins-, yeah.

It's inside out. This is all the receptors.

Is he a cow?

Are you inside out?

I'm opening the stomach so I can see the intestines.

I take the whole gill and the intestines out of the fish.

It is um interesting and disgusting at the same time actually.

Now I'm trying to open the head of the fish,

so you can see the gills.

And then I try to uh yeah take the gills out with a,

with a knife.

First I was working on um on the stomachs.

In the garden of my parents,

I built a really primitive um uh tannery with, with barrels.

And I start with uh recipes from the Eskimos,

like um [laughs] urine.

And my mom was asking why are you drinking so much?

And I said I have to fill the whole bo-, barrel today.

Animal intestines can be uh

beautiful when you treat it and it's finished,

and it's so, yeah it's so beautiful.

I'm also eating the fish. So it's like uh up-cycling,

making better use of the materials.

So now I'm placing the, the dried gill on the, the stand.

I put uh the name of the fish,

like the scientific displays in a natural museum.

What I like about nature is that it's moving,

it's uh growing, and I'm also part of nature.

And um when I'm outside, um I don't know, it just,

you just feel more alive or something with the wind in your hair,

and with all those animals around you.

- I saw a picture in a textbook of a diaphonized mouse.

I just thought that was the most beautiful and fascinating thing.

And when I couldn't purchase one,

being a scientist and a crazy person,

I decided to make them myself.

They basically feel like giant gummy bears with bones.

- Will it move though?

Yeah. You can still see the cartilage in the nasal cavity.

And then if you take it out and you're delicate--

Yeah hold the jar.

You can see it's a little bit-- - Yeah.

--stiff but it's like a gummy bear.

- And the little tongue inside. - Mm-hmm.

- It's an old technique.

I did not invent the technique for diaphonization.

You use chemistry in order to highlight

the underlying structures of the animal,

the cartilage and the bones, and then alter the refractive index,

or the way that light works with the skin and muscle,

so it becomes transparent.

I'm trying to look a little deeper than just the skin

and see the underlying tissue that really show

how an animal interacted with the world,

or uh what they came from even.

It was a very strange creature. It looks like a snake,

but it's actually a type of skink.

And if you look closely, you can see this is the sternum,

and where the arms would attach, and then this is tail.

And then down here, where it kind of opens up,

that is the pelvis.

And the vestigial hind legs are still there.

You can see the tiny bits of bone that are inside it.

At first glance,

most people would assume this slithering creature is a snake.

But if you know what's underneath the skin,

there's so much more to it.

- I've always had such a connection with nature

and I've always considered myself

like kind of an old-fashioned naturalist, you know,

like the gentleman adventurer or something.

There's a woodpecker up on that. Do you see him?

- Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

We're watching nature so much. We're out in nature so much.

And I think the thing that so attracts me to taxidermy

is it's both a science and an art.

If I take a picture of my nail polish

next to whatever I'm trying to match,

if I know that this color is correct,

then I know how to match that color.

And this'll be my little rock with the lichen on it.

When I work on a piece,

that piece should tell a story about nature.

It should inspire people.

- No. I think it's a ladder back.

- It's a ladder back.

It's not just about identifying something,

but when you start to know what things are

and identify them, you start to care about them.

My family is like lovely, artistic, back woods Indiana.

Like when you meet them, you're like

oh that makes sense.

When I told them, you know,

I'm gonna leave my lucrative job and go be a taxidermist,

they're like well you could have just stayed here.

Like you didn't, you didn't have to move to do that.

It took getting away from nature

in many ways to really truly appreciate it,

and really appreciate my roots, and where I came from.

- So Travis was visiting and I had to go pick up this mountain lion.

And he kinda said like hey do you want help on this?

- What we're working on is quite a young cat.

He was hit by a car and delivered to a nature centre.

- We're actually leaving a few spots

where you can see some road rash,

and it's going to tell that story.

And the more lifelike that animal is,

the more people will care about its species.

- The head was custom sculpt from a copy of his own head.

That's why the skin on his head fits so well.

Reference is the most important thing

when it comes to doing taxidermy work.

You gotta have a good collection of photographs,

measurements, castings.

Mountain lions are very rare.

To have the opportunity to go and look at them are even rarer.

Hmm, hmm. I know. I know.

- Oh I hear the purr.

- Lions don't purr. - No this is the biggest cat that still purrs.

Look at this.

I'm very lucky to have a great relationship

with Dave Jackson.

And he has this amazing place called Conservation Ambassadors.

Oh you get a nuzzle.

Our organization is set up as a rescue zoo.

So all the animals here are rescue animals

from some situation,

animals that are injured in the wild and can't be put back in the wild,

and illegal pets.

People think they're gonna

bring something like a monkey home into their house.

- You want this? Okay, yes, sir. Yes, sir.

But what we do with them is not

just stick 'em in a cage forever.

They get to come out and they get to be

what we call ambassadors.

And their second chance at life is coming to schools with us.

Retention level of information from the education

goes up exponentially when they can touch

something and when they can meet a live animal.

I use a lot of artifacts in our, our presentations,

our programs,

because I can't let the kids come up and touch a cougar.

- Yeah.

- But I can let them touch a cougar skin.

- Exactly.

- I can let them feel that amazing fur.

Taxidermy and live animals, they're so intertwined.

They're so important to each other.

Now you can tell stories of not just natural history,

but you can tell stories with taxidermy of today,

what's going on today, like a mountain lion gets hit by a car.

That's, that's what happens today.

- Caring about nature is protecting nature.

And that's what we're trying to instill

in people when we create these things.

- Don't you use porcupine hair as replacement whiskers?

- You can, yeah.

- In lions?

- Yeah, for some cats.

- Yeah.

- It works well. Ah, don't back up.

- Uh no, dude. Don't get up. Oh geez.

It's all about connection, getting people connected with nature.

Kids are growing up in the living room.

They're not going out and digging up worms.

They're not catching craw dads in the creek.

All right, come on in.

- All right.

So uh this is our frozen zoo.

This is um our Asian fishing cat.

- She's beautiful.

- And she educated her whole life.

She went to schools every day.

She's been on every show you could imagine.

- It'll be interesting to come up with, you know,

a pose that you feel really is her.

- Aww. How's my girl?

- What is truly unique about Dave is his understanding of death.

He doesn't want to waste.

He knows that there's value

in them continuing to educate people.

- There's wildlife crises everywhere all the time.

We get into an ecosystem and we mess it all up with,

with freeways and pollution and everything.

If I was to snap my fingers right now

and all the people were to fall off the face of the Earth,

the animals would do just fine.

But if I was to snap my fingers right now

and all the animals were to fall off the face of the Earth,

yeah turns out we need them and they don't need us.

So [laughs] we gotta have a generation

that's still connected to nature.

- Over 100 years ago,

part of our whole national psyche

was that we had endless resources, you know,

this endless frontier of the West.

Conservation was such a new idea,

and I think that's one of the hardest things for us to grasp.

'Cause the idea itself just wasn't there.

And I think you could make a parallel

between climate change and this.

That shift took a while for people to realize like

oh we might actually have to curb our behavior.

The top scientists at the time,

who worked for the American Museum of Natural History,

and the Field Museum, and so on,

they were coming out of a different scientific mode,

which was more about just cataloguing, collecting,

and knowledge for the sake of knowledge.

They knew enough about habitat loss.

They could see it in America's West.

They could see it in Africa, because of the,

the rampant colonialism that was taking place there.

They knew that all of these species were very likely going to go extinct.

So they would collect one of those species for the museum,

so we would have a collection.

It was an archive for future generations to see what we'd lost.

Like this was a giraffe,

this was an elephant.

The idea that we might use science to try and change

the way things were wasn't really part of their MO.

Theodore Roosevelt was a very pivotal figure.

He was still a man of his time. He was a hunter.

A lot of conservationists, in retrospect,

but also at the time, his contemporaries,

criticized him for being too trigger-happy,

'cause I mean he came home with animals that

he had shot in Africa that could be measured in the tons.

There's no getting around that.

But at the same time,

he was the first one who really started

to preserve land in the United States,

because he was one of the first people to really realize

that the frontier was closed, that this idea that nature

was inexhaustible wasn't true. I-. it is exhaustible.

And that was not a popular idea at the time.

That's what makes him one of the most

paradoxical figures of his time.

And Akeley worshipped him.

And I think Akeley probably was inspired enough by him,

that by the time he looked into those gorilla's eyes

and he had his own personal transformation,

he kind of lived something that

TR had been talking about for years.

When he had his moment of epiphany,

it was when he was killing gorillas.

People were going in with licenses

to kill like 20 gorillas at a time.

And he knew that at the rate they were going,

I mean they would have been extinct within 10 years.

And so he managed to persuade the Belgian government

to create a sanctuary to protect the mountain gorilla.

It's the first wildlife sanctuary in Africa.

To save the habitat was to save the animal.

And that's what saved the mountain gorillas.

- Every hunter I know that's a true hunter actually loves nature.

And that's something that I feel like so many people

just can't wrap their minds around.

How can you love animals and still want to hunt them?

- Fold it back.

- Hunters are the greatest conservationists.

They spend the most amount of money on land,

on labour to protect the animals.

And they spend the most amount of time with the animals.

Hunting serves a purpose, so it all goes back to that.

There has to be a reason,

whether it's because people need food,

or if it's just game management.

A world without hunting is gonna be a pretty sad world,

because nothing's gonna have a value economically.

And if wildlife doesn't have an economic value,

it just won't be around.

It just won't.

So this is actual taxidermy.

It's the difference between just

gluing and pinning and sewing a skin on a form,

but actually understanding where it needs to go,

working out wrinkles,

and putting hair patterns where they need to actually go.

There's not very many taxidermists in Europe,

just because there's not a lot of hunting in Europe.

And part of the reason there's not a lot of hunting in Europe

is 'cause there's no animals in Europe.

Growing up in Switzerland,

there's no such thing as going on a nature hike

and seeing animals.

I wish most Americans would just realize

how incredibly fortunate we all are.

- When I was very small, I once found a rabbit skull.

And I thought it was so cool and so neat.

I think it was like the most appreciated position I ever had.

- For us, it's very principle that we only work with animals

that died of natural causes, and that lived in captivity.

If you talk about hunting here in the Netherlands,

they think it's animal cruelty.

They eat animals from a factory,

but hunting is uh a no-go area.

I'm not a fan of hunting, but it's not all bad.

Since here in Holland,

you have like protected areas where they keep deers

and other rare animals.

But these places are crowded now.

So it looks very funny in the summer.

But, when the winter comes, they all starve to death.

And I think that's wrong.

- Uh when you take out the body,

you have to sort of copy it exactly,

because the skin that comes off is like uh tailored suits.

It fits only one way.

So you have to take all the measurements.

In Holland, taxidermy isn't that common.

So many people think we just cut it open,

empty it with a spoon,

and, and put something back in it,

and then it's finished.

- Stuff it up.

When you explain how much work it is,

then people appreciate it more.

These are all gonna go on a birdcage,

on the outside,

try to make a whole story of all the birds

interacting with each other, talking, looking at each other.

All caged in, but you know, looks like they're all free.

The animals we use otherwise gets thrown away.

And it's either in the bin or we make something out of it.

So sort of give it a second life.

So my pet chinchilla just died recently.

It ' s about one to maybe three pounds.

I was wondering if you guys could possibly give me a-

- Last message received. - No.

This is why we don't pick up the studio phone.

You end up on the phone with these people for forever.

- I have a deceased owl that died on my property.

- It doesn't work like that.

- Lived for 10 years on the property.

I found an owl, I found an eagle. They can't have it.

You really can't convince them that it's federal law

and that they can't have it,

because they're like well it died on my property.

And it's like okay but if you found cocaine on your property,

like you couldn't have that either.

What I'm working on here and what we're really gearing up for

is the Visual Voyages exhibit at the Huntington Library.

Visual Voyages is expressions of nature from

Columbus to Darwin in Latin America,

you know, explorers, biologists, all of that

going over there and being like

what are these little shiny amazing birds,

or you know, what is this anteater,

what are these armadillos?

I was talking to Ken on the phone,

and you know, he is such a mentor to us and everything.

He's like well if you need any help.

I think this is all fitting pretty well.

This is a little square, the space in between here,

but I don't know if that's how the anatomy works.

- Actually this isn't too bad because they,

that, that is a, a pretty common pose.

- Uh-huh.

- For these guys, like the,

you know, the, that spread on the feet.

The armadillos are gonna be actual touch pieces.

And they're so unique and they're something that like,

you know, I've never worked on before.

I don't see how armadillos are from the planet Earth.

I really don't.

I don't know where I would be without the kind of advice and leadership,

and that you have people in this industry

that are so willing to do that.

Do you like these little rods? They're cool, eh?

- I do like these little rods.

Those are gonna be my new friends.

- Mm-hmm.

I had to defend the girls when they first showed up on the scene.

You know, people start smart-mouthing to me,

I put 'em in their place real quick.

A lot of the Millennials are into like rogue taxidermy,

which is, you know, making strange creatures

and doing things that traditional taxidermists would-,

wouldn't be caught dead doing, which is art.

So I love it. I love anything to do with art.

- Rogue taxidermy is a genre of pop surrealist art

that utilize conventional taxidermy-related materials

in an unconventional manner.

Taxidermy for a long time really had a stigma attached to it,

where it was like wearing a fur coat.

You're hurting animals and you're exploiting the animals.

The animals I work with die of natural causes

or are byproducts of the livestock industry.

People don't think about their animal consumption,

when I say consumption, not even what you eat.

They don't think about the clothing they wear,

the products they use.

But you know, when you're looking at taxidermy,

it has eyes. It forces you to think about it.

The Goth Griffin,

which is a combination of a crow and a black cat,

which is a combination of a crow and a black cat,

New York Times Art section in 2004.

And that was the catalyst for interest in the genre.

When people came to be part of our group

and want to kind of work under that umbrella of rogue taxidermy,

they had to pledge that they wouldn't harm

animals to make the work.

So that kind of rebranded taxidermy.

Like all of a sudden it wasn't about killing an animal.

It has a recycling aspect to it.

Capricorn is constructed out of a stillborn lamb,

a carp, and grouse wings.

And then the antlers on that are from a

vintage roe deer trophy plaque.

A lot of people, when I first started doing this,

didn't think that what I was doing was acceptable whatsoever,

not ethical, not moral.

I never understood why I would get just like lambasted,

attacked, just like horrible hate mail,

whereas men that were doing it, no hate mail.

Taxidermy is really rapidly losing that good old boys club

feeling that it had for so many years.

Not to say that never were awesome female taxidermists before,

but now we've got women that are like at the forefront

of what's been popularizing taxidermy.

- Of course there's always the novelty taxidermy that has

really become en vogue too.

Novelty is when you have the animals playing cards

or paddling a canoe or whatever.

That was really big back in Victorian time period.

t seems to me like it kinda completely went away for a while,

and now it seems to be resurging.

Taxidermy in general is making quite a resurgence,

especially Victorian taxidermy.

There's a big history of taxidermy and fashion.

And I think that's one of the main ways that

taxidermy actually entered the mainstream

during the Victorian era.

Queen Victoria was really the one who kinda started that.

She started wearing these amazing plumes in her hair,

wearing feathers elsewhere on her garb,

and small ones in pins and things like that.

And she's the reason we call it Victorian era.

But you know, it really had a dark side to it.

We lost several hundred species

in the 1800s to both collecting and haberdashery,

hats, um or, or just hat pins like this one.

In my case, this bird died in captivity.

It's not bad for the environment,

and it's probably the most natural thing I put in my hair.

You're always gonna get asked about it.

Maybe in some ways, it's my sneaky way of

of getting people in Hollywood to learn about animals.

I've been lucky enough to get some high profile fashion-y clients.

In the new Gucci fragrance campaign,

you can see my Victorian bird dome.

It's got a lot of elements from their scents in it.

I worked with EB Florals

and we actually turned some of my birds into diffusers.

They've been in Vanity Fair, Marie Claire,

things that like I was like reading as a kid.

You know, it's all these crazy fashion things I could never have,

and then my stuff is in them

And I'm a taxidermist. Like how weird is that?

The Victorians were obsessed with hummingbirds.

John Gould did these beautiful hummingbird cases

for the Great Exhibit held in London in the 1850s.

And so I'm re-creating two of those cases.

I make a little body based on their actual body.

I go slightly smaller in some areas,

and then maybe a little fuller in the chest and others,

because you have to imagine it actually being alive.

They're very small.

So as you can imagine, they're very delicate.

If you pull at all, the skin rips.

If it heats up, the skin rips.

If you look at it funny or think sad thoughts, the skin rips.

So I try to stay real calm when I'm working on hummingbirds.

These hummingbirds were collected from the Moore Lab.

- The Moore Lab is a really spectacular place.

We have this amazing bird collection,

65,000 specimens.

We have one of the best hummingbird collections in the world.

This is a blue-tufted starthroat collected in 1929.

- These guys are going to be on this exhibit at the Huntington,

but then ultimately they're going to end up

at the Moore Lab on display as part of the collection.

One of the things that's most important to the Moore Lab

is having the correct anatomy,

having the correct characteristic behaviors.

So I get to learn so much from them.

- Where Allis has been great

is in working in some of our scientific ideas

into the taxidermy,

so we can talk about our science

with a bird in a lifelike pose that sparks the imagination.

- I got interested in taxidermy when I was about nine years old.

My grandpa taught this school.

- I started doing taxidermy when I was 16 back in 1968.

I got interested, I seen articles

in my granddad's hunting magazines all the time,

since I was a little kid.

And I just started a school, started teaching taxidermy.

- I took his full taxidermy course when I was 13,

and then created my own business called

Remington Taxidermy.

And then this crazy person took grandpa's class

and became my adopted big sister.

And ever since then,

we've had this bond that we just share together.

- One day, I can draw up concepts, I can,

the next day, if I'm sick of it, I have animals to skin.

If I'm sick of that, I can

work on chemistry and science with tanning.

I literally cannot get sick of it.

- Dakota and I met at the World Show

when I'd flown in from South Africa.

Us as a younger crowd, we tend to stick together.

One of the cool things about the World Shows

having the Collaborative Artists Division

is there is that opportunity to make something

with people you really want to work with.

We seldom ever get the opportunity to work together,

especially on something like a competition piece.

And that's what we did with this little zebra.

We're trying to do something here with a baby animal,

which is pretty difficult.

Very difficult to find reference of babies.

- It's all about what your work looks like,

can you prove yourself.

- I love making things from scratch and

being able to do it exactly how I want to.

- Commercial taxidermy is, you know,

just putting out a nice piece,

good quality work in a decent time for clients.

But you can really get into the art in a competition

that you can't afford to put into a client's work.

- A baby animal trying to stand up,

it's not typically anything anyone would do.

There's a hell of a lot going on,

and it's not easy to make it look real.

This technique that we're using is not a popular technique.

Something like this being fully customized from the original animal,

it's far more accurate.

You can focus more on anatomy and expression

and what's actually going on in composition,

and less about just getting the skin to fit.

Taxidermy's an extremely labour-intensive work.

You spend countless hours grinding away

at the most insignificant of details, or so it would appear.

We try just our very best to stay sane,

and create works of art.

But the world doesn't appreciate it.

- Um hot gluing the seam together,

so then when we pour the foam in,

then we don't have foam running out between the lines.

I've never made like a cast body like this before.

- We looked at the original ears

and highlighted all of the veins and where they were.

And then we're hollowing them out in the mold.

- I've always learned from Grandpa.

And Travis is kinda my first time of one-on-one with someone,

learning something really new.

- We're trying to get something alive and asymmetrical.

We got a puckered up lip line, flared nostrils,

pumped up blood veins.

We're trying to get that really worried look on its face.

The art of taxidermy is re-creating the animal precisely,

but breathing life into it.

Because if you just take all the measurements, the casting,

all that reference you get from the specimen,

and assemble it, you got a dead animal.

You gotta know the animal. You've gotta know nature.

You gotta know how they behave,

what they eat, where they live.

It becomes one of these things that you just can't shake.

You can't stop thinking about it.

It's always on the back of your mind.

Like where am I going wrong?

Why does this not look alive?

And it never will.

But it's something that we strive to perfect.

- To me, the competitions ain't so much winning the competition,

it's learning.

And the more you can learn, the better you get.

- I think that's another thing that taxidermists all have in common.

We always want to keep getting better and better.

And that's why we're so excited to go to places like

the World Championship.

- That's when I met pretty much all the other big name

in the industry.

- We're not the best taxidermists in the world.

We saw today we're not.

- It doesn't really matter where you come from and,

where you are in your career.

Somehow we all have this connection

and you become this really close-knit family.

- Even though we're really different from each other,

we have a common language

that other people simply don't speak.

- So I need all my Euro pins that everyone is constantly

stealing from me.

Hunting down all the weird little things that I need.

There's like nice-colored stout roughers.

And I think every lady needs a golden caliper.

Oh, yes. Thank you.

- Oh a shopping basket, there you go.

- I know. I'm gonna need a cart though.

- Even though we're the producers, uh it's magical for us.

- Oh, it is.

- Yeah we've been doing it for about 27 years.

It's just remarkable the effort

and time that each artist puts into their piece.

To look at 'em is just splitting hairs,

if you want to say --

--to be able to determine which one is the best piece.

- When we're judging a show like this,

a lot of us are kinda old timers

that have been judging the show for many, many, many years.

I kinda started hearing people say well, you know,

a lot of these old timers couldn't compete today.

I wanted to see if I could still run with the big dogs.

I competed with this re-creation of a gorilla.

It's o-, 100% artificial.

That was pretty cool for me because I actually won

all the top awards.

I won Best of Show, I won People's Choice,

I won everything.

- Every once in a while, we'll have an individual come in

and I can immediately see

they're gonna be superstars quick.

And one of those was Travis de Villiers from South Africa.

He is one of the super talents at a very young age.

And Daniel Meng.

- Yeah he's a young competitor right now. He's, he's fiery.

He won last time for the first time,

his first Best in World.

He'll do it again too.

- The competition world can open the world to ya.

If you're good enough and you believe

that you can do something that the world needs to see,

then you have this venue to show it to them.

- Did you expect to win anything?

- No.

- We got a 95.

- And then to find a judge to get a critique and him

basically being like I have nothing to say.

I'm shaking.

Yeah it's been a great experience.

We worked our asses off.

- We did work our asses off.

- Africa moves to its own beat.

It's its way of life.

It's the rhythm it moves to, like nowhere else.

Being back into that rhythm now,

it's sort of put the world into perspective.

I needed to be back here to ground myself

back to who I am.

Africa is home.

It's where the animals that inspire me to do the work I do are.

I've always wanted to do work that's unique and dynamic.

I needed to take off and leave the nest completely,

and try to surround myself with the best people that I knew,

and by so doing, find that inspiration again to create art.

- We really want to work with Travis,

taking our point of view together with Travis's point of view

and his sculpting skills,

doing sort of a mix-up of Europe and Africa.

It's a very nice combination,

with the black and white of the guinea fowls,

and the white of the statues.

- Rotate it like this a little bit. Yeah.

It really started with the idea of using spears.

It's like when you make a sketch,

you make a composition,

first you start with lines to make a shape.

So then we thought if we use spears,

it would be a great way to make a big piece with small parts.

And it also has a story.

Bring spears back to Africa and working with an

African sculptor together in one piece.

We thought it would be nice.

- We're the invisible artist.

You shouldn't see us.

You should just see nature.

I'm always trying to educate.

And that's what I try to put into my work,

is those opportunities to tell a story.

And that's what's so great about doing things in museums

and nature centers,

is those stories are gonna be told so many times.

- It's funny, when you ask me what my profession is,

I still don't even think of it like that.

It's definitely a passion.

I remember going to these zoos, you know, and things would die.

And I just felt like ah it's such a waste, you know,

it's such a beautiful animal. It's so rare.

There's not very many of them.

The only other place you can see these are in museums.

So I feel like they need to be preserved somehow.

- I will actually retire from

the Milwaukee Public Museum next year.

For financial reasons,

the museum administration has uh

eliminated most of the exhibits department.

And I am part of the exhibits department.

It's really, really, really sad because it's gonna be an end of an era.

And I will have had 35 and a half years there.

Tim came up and gave me a big hug and he said

he didn't know he would be the last survivor.

- When I was a kid and I was reading books

and then trying to do taxidermy,

I told my parents that, you know, one day

I was gonna be working in a museum.

Most major museums had taxidermists,

say back in the '50s and '60s.

I got to walk through these halls as a kid and look at their work and admire it.

You know, I hope when the time comes

that I'm not gonna be here full-time anymore,

well there'll be somebody coming in to carry that legacy on.

- The individuals that are in taxidermy all have very unique talents.

You gotta know the animal. You've gotta know nature

You gotta know how they behave.

Being able to have the skillset to capture that is very rare.

You end up spending your entire life trying to do that.

But it makes for an interesting life.

- In art, a lot of people who use taxidermy for artwork,

they use it in a different way.

They want to shock people.

We are the opposite.

We want to emphasize the beauty of it,

because they are beautiful.

- When you skin an animal, it becomes material in a way.

But it's such beautiful material

and you know where it's from.

So give the credits where it belong:

in nature.

- Taxidermists just love animals.

We show people this little frozen bit of nature.

- We treat this as somewhat of a silent obsession,

re-creating the animal, breathing life into it.

- It's this connection that cannot be described.

- There's a little piece of us that goes into every single

mount we do.

- I get to make that golden eagle immortal.

I'm immortal in that too.

My passion is.