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Monday, May 13, 2019

The 'Olympics of taxidermy' comes to Missouri

The 2019 World Taxidermy & Fish Carving Championships is at the Springfield Expo Center this month. Gathered here are approximately 1,000 experts in the art of bringing the dead back to life. It ain't Easter, but it's still pretty neat.




From Erin Heffernan at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: "The structure of the competition is a bit like the Westminster dog show, except that these animals happen to be dead.

Subcategories divide some 550 entries into groups as specific as “Whitetail Deer Heads: Long/thick hair, open mouth” and “Turkeys, strutting.”

There are categories for animal rugs, fish, waterfowl and "interpretive taxidermy," featuring the more experimental work. Past winners include a dinosaur. This year there were two long-extinct prehistoric birds, a jolly beaver morphing into a wood log and a cougar blending into a rock in the shape of Texas."

When the entries are all in and every hair settled in place, judges get to work prodding noses and running their fingers through the fur that competitors just obsessively combed.

Wendy Christensen, one of two women tasked with judging the small mammals, stands about an inch away from a beaver with a wide-open mouth.

"Now what is your story? Why are you yelling at me?" she asks the beaver. "I like there to be a clear emotion."

Christensen worked doing taxidermy for 35 years at the Milwaukee Public Museum and has a handful of world titles herself. She began learning the craft when she was 12 through a correspondence course.

She moves on to a bobcat. “Oh, is he soft,” she says, feeling the fur. She sticks her finger in the ears and gives them a tug. "Good ear connection."

She looks at the legs. "Muscle is bulged out all wrong."

She puts her hand under the tail and feels the cat's rear. "I know it's a little weird," she says as she feels around for the detail work. "I have to feel them up a bit."



The rest of the story plus many, many more photos at this link, or simply click on any picture.