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containing enticements such as this one:
“BECAUSE REAL GAME CONSERVATION
PRACTICES ARE NECESSARY TO PRESERVE
OUR WILD-GAME! Unrestricted hunting is
the thing of the past. … TAXIDERMY makes
up for this restricted shooting. It enables the
sportsman to DOUBLE his enjoyment from
hunting or fishing, by being able to preserve
PERMANENTLY all of his finest trophies. There
is no surer way for you to greatly INCREASE your
hunting pleasure than to learn TAXIDERMY. …
Any average man or boy who takes our course,
studies and practices the lessons … is ALMOST
CERTAIN to find ways of turning his knowledge
into CASH.”
I considered sending $10 to order the nine
NST “to be sequentially mailed” lessons, and
something my parents did helped me decide to
“go for it.”
My family moved us from our 13-acre farm to
nearby Greer, S.C. Before I started 7th grade, my
parents bought a mounted gray squirrel from
Ford McKinney, who worked in a textile mill but
learned taxidermy as a hobby. The squirrel—
purchased for $25 or less—held a hickory nut
between its front feet and sat upright on a log
with its tail curled upward in an “S” shape. That
squirrel influenced me to order the lessons.
The NST was located at 1202 Howard St. in
Omaha, Nebraska. J.W. Elwood founded the
school in 1903. It also sold taxidermy supplies.
In the early 1900s, “taxidermy was known to
only a few; the methods had been kept secret,”
sources say. “But Mr. Elwood believed he could
teach it by mail just as effectively as he had done
it with his friends in his home.”
Stephen Rogers says many who took up
taxidermy over 45 years ago “had their beginnings
with the old J.W. Elwood Northwestern School
of Taxidermy Correspondence School.” Rogers
says Elwood “made a ‘killing’ by ‘teaching’
taxidermy to the common folk.” His NST lessons
are still offered, at times, on E-bay.
I received my first NST booklet; it was about
mounting birds. Few illustrations accompanied
the black-and-white printed pages. I stayed at
my paternal grandparents’ nearby farm for a
few days and carried my Red Ryder BB gun. An
electric line crossed my grandparents’ pasture,
and I spotted an Eastern Meadowlark perched
on one of the wires. My shot hit the bird in the
chest, and it plummeted. Growing up in farming
country and seeing animals processed for food
or being “put down,” I didn’t feel many twangs
of conscience about that lark’s demise. But I had
heard in church that a sparrow did not fall to
the ground without God knowing about it, and
I thought about that.
I laid the bird on a newspaper on a table and
read something like this from my lesson: “The
breast of a bird is bare. This is a great boon to
the taxidermist.” I parted feathers covering the
meadowlark’s torso. Its breast was, indeed, bare.
Per instructions, I made an incision from the top
to the bottom of the breast with my X-Acto knife.
I skinned the bird, taking out the body but
leaving the skull, plus bones in the wings and
feet. Brain tissue had to be removed. I cut tissue
from the skull’s exterior and later replaced tissue
with clay. The feathers unfortunately gathered
moisture during flesh removal. Years later,
someone wrote about that lesson: “Mounting
small birds calls for a lot more patience and skill
than most young boys can muster.”
I had ordered supplies from NST and used
NST wire to fashion the bird’s skeleton. Wires
extended through the feet to a wooden pedestal.
Around that wire skeleton, I wrapped something
called “Kara-flex,” as I recall. It was an artificial
straw-like material. I looped string around
the Kara-flex and ordered glass eyes for the
meadowlark. Weeks later, my finished product
disappointed me—the pitiful meadowlark
appeared bedraggled.
Lesson two, telling how to stuff a squirrel,
arrived, and someone gave me a harvested
squirrel. Beginning with an incision down
the subject’s front, the skinning progressed
over the head and to the nose, which had to
stay connected to the skull. I scraped off skull
tissue but had no stomach for removing the
brain, which was bigger than the bird’s brain I
had removed. My grandmother dipped into the
skull with a tiny spoon and took out the brain.
I skinned the squirrel to his feet and tail. To
preserve his skin, I soaked it in an alum solution
for a day or two, as I recall.
I procured a log slab with bark intact and
planned to position my squirrel as though he
were running up the side of a tree but pausing
and peering slightly downward, as though looking
for danger. I drilled holes in the slab to later
receive wires extending from the squirrel’s feet.
I sculpted the replacement body from
Kara-flex, wrapping it around wire serving as a
skeleton. That wire also ran up inside the tail,
parallel to the bone left inside.
After pulling the skin over the sculpted
torso, I stitched it together at the incision site.
I think I cemented the glass eyes in place before
returning the skin to the skull and filling the
squirrel’s mouth with colored NST wax. I laid
the squirrel, stomach-down, on the slab and
inserted feet wires into drilled holes. I bent the
wires on the slab’s backside and covered them
with felt. I attached a hanger and hung the
trophy on a wall, adjusting the squirrel’s tail to
flow downward in a subtle “S” shape. My folks
thought my squirrel turned out better than the
meadowlark.
Someone gave me a hawk, and I tried to
stuff it. Mr. Hawk went from “handsome” to
appearing underweight and having been, as the
old folks used to say, “beat with an ugly stick.”
Somebody gave me another squirrel, but
after I soaked his hide in alum solution, most of
his hair came out. That was my last taxidermy
project. I gave someone my nine lessons. All
my “trophy mounts”—including my best one,
the “squirrel climbing a tree”—ended up in the
county dump.
After WWI, photography began replacing
taxidermy. Museums finished creating most
habitat dioramas by the 1940s, sources say,
and big game hunting became less socially
acceptable after WWII. The Northwestern School
of Taxidermy reportedly went out of business
around 1980. But now there is a revival of
taxidermy, and many women are participating,
some say. Pat Morris, author of “A History of
Taxidermy: Art, Science, and Bad Taste,” says a
“sense of getting back in touch with the physical
world is at the core of taxidermy’s rebirth.”
According to writer Matt Blitz, Ms. Allis
Markham, who worked as Walt Disney
Corporation’s director of social media
strategy, completed a deer specimen during
a 2-week taxidermy school and felt a sense of
accomplishment. “It existed in the real world
and not on a computer,” Markham said. She
quit her job to open a business called “Prey
Taxidermy” in Los Angeles. She creates “ethical”
pieces, meaning that no animal she works on
died solely for taxidermy.
I don’t intend to try stuffing any more
creatures, despite reports of a taxidermy revival.
I admire the art, but if I had to stuff another bird
or an animal, I might go a little squirrelly.
Larry Steve Crain lives in Southern Pines.
Taxidermy specimen of a squirrel.
“What good is the warmth of summer,
without the cold of winter
to give it sweetness.” ~ John Steinbeck p.34 The Pinehurst Gazette, Inc. No. 129
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