Taxidermy School Fills Up; Popularity Grows In This Stuffy Trade

STOYSTOWN, Pa. - The butchers were taking a little too much off the top.

For years, hunters had been hauling deer heads into Joel and Tammy Zimmerman's taxidermy school and studio, hoping to get back a majestic mount for the den or living room.

Trouble was, the butchers who carved up deer for venison steaks sawed off the heads right behind the ears.

That meant the nose would point at the floor like a plumb bob when the head was attached to a board, and the deer looked depressed.

"I had to go around to each one of them last year and tell them to start cutting a little lower, down toward the shoulders, so they'd look like this," Tammy Zimmerman said, gesturing to a buck's head on the wall at the Northwood School of Taxidermy in Stoystown, about 60 miles southwest of Pittsburgh.

For this kind of attention to detail, hunters and anglers will pay top dollar. They are putting more technical demands on something that was once learned from correspondence courses advertised in Boys' Life magazine, but has evolved into a highly specialized craft.

The best taxidermists have backlogs of a year, suggesting a shortage in the field, said Ralph Garland, a taxidermy instructor at Piedmont Community College in Roxboro, N.C. Taxidermy educators attribute recent increases in business to a higher number of hunters, anglers and trophy hunts.

`More of an art form'

Grocery warehouse laborer Lowell Hettrick is studying under Garland and is counting on a need for more talented taxidermists in Athens, Ga.

"I think of taxidermy as more of an art form," said Hettrick, 28.

The Northwood school, one of about a dozen in the country, charges $4,995 for a 13-week course and attracts students from as far away as Iceland.

Students are graded on how lifelike their bobcats, otters, fish and deer heads look. They mimic the muscles on a foam interior. Animals are no longer stuffed with straw or horsehair, which collapse over the years.

Clay fills out the paws, and the same styling gel that puts the "big" in big hair makes the animal's ears perk up as if it's listening for danger. The right eye color is necessary for the right look, maybe even one that follows someone around a room. One supplier, K.L. Glasaugen of Germany, offers 36 varieties of bear eyes.

"If the eye looks bad, it ruins the whole mount," said Joel Zimmerman, Northwood's owner and chief instructor. He also is the most recent winner of a craftsmanship award from Taxidermy Today magazine: for a scene of an otter stalking two trout in a frozen pond.

At his studio in the drugstore building where he bought sodas as a kid, he had just finished mounting a Dall sheep on top of a home-entertainment center. The fee for stuffing a cape buffalo is $8,300, a wolf $1,000, a turkey $400. An open mouth, difficult to fashion without it looking droopy, adds $100 to the bill.

Some people like their kill mounted in a threatening stance. Zimmerman prefers a more placid pose.

"They sometimes want it up on its hind legs, really aggressive, like it's ready to attack. In nature, you don't see a lot of that happening," Zimmerman said.

In nearby Martinsburg, former Montana trail guide and Northwood student Domenick Draper is working on a $10,000 display of two hyenas chasing a zebra across the African plains. The studio where Draper works often links up with carpenters to accommodate increasing orders for animals mounted on furniture.

`It's a profession'

"Some people think it's a hobby-type of career where you can just make some money on the side, and that's not the case at all," said Draper's boss, Marcus Zimmerman. "It's a profession, and it takes a lot of time to learn."

Terry Ehrlich, editor of Taxidermy Today, said the craft he calls "high art" once was confined to museum staffs, a small circle of professionals and anyone with $9 to spend on the J.W. Elwood Lessons In Taxidermy mail kit.

The craft took off in the late 1950s when taxidermists finally started sharing jealously guarded trade secrets. It is drawing more truckers and paramedics whose large blocks of time off are tailor-made for part-time taxidermy.

Women also are making inroads. Although they account for less than 5 percent of the profession, they are winning a disproportionate share of awards.

"That has gotten some people's attention. They're wondering if maybe these girls can come into the Bubba network," Ehrlich said from the magazine offices in Chester, S.C.

The advances in taxidermy are not only putting spiffier heads on the walls but also keeping the taxidermists healthy. They once coated animal hides with poisonous arsenic to keep bugs away.

"It killed the critters," Ehrlich said, "and it killed the taxidermist, too, if he messed with it long enough."