Still Life Melissa Milgrom (notion reading list .txt) 📖

a tawny owl on eBay mounted before 1947 (legal) or a tawny owl mounted last month (a punishable crime). This area of the law is very complicated, because protected species vary from country to country, as do the fines. Although guild members are mostly good blokes who comply with cites, some taxidermists do not. In fact, next to drug trafficking, animal smuggling is one of Britain's most persistent crimes.

British taxidermists have always had a fair share of forgers and smugglers among them, and over the years London's Metropolitan Police Wildlife Crime Unit has seized tens of thousands of endangered species being sold illegally as taxidermy, Chinese medicine, and luxury fashion accessories. One of the worst taxidermy crimes in recent history occurred in 2000, when London's best-known taxidermist, Robert Sclare, who runs the shop Get Stuffed in Islington, was charged with illegal possession of endangered wildlife. Sixty specimens were seized, including a stuffed tiger cub (less than a week old); tiger, leopard, wolf, and chimp mounts; gorilla skulls; an elephant foot and tusks; and rare lemurs and birds of prey. Sclare was found guilty on twenty-nine counts of permit forgery and twelve counts of illegally displaying animals. He was sentenced to six months in prison. When I told Mayer I wanted to visit the shop, she forbade me to do so, because that incident has given taxidermy a bad name.

Mayer stands in line, holding Last Journey, Precious Cargo, while the woman in front of her registers. "It's the first time I've done this," the woman says timidly. She needs to find a place to sleep, she says. "You can share a room with me," McDonald purrs, flashing a big, gap-toothed grin. Then he sends the woman upstairs to drop off her mounts for judging. When it's Mayer's turn, McDonald shouts with a brogue, "Bloody Chairbitch and you only bring one specimen! Go put a red dot on the bloody nose of your terrier!"

When the guild was established in 1976, taxidermy was floundering. It was an era of ecological awareness, and the big museums, having already plundered every jungle and ice floe for specimens, needed no more. So they began to ax taxidermy posts and shut down their workshops, sending their taxidermists off to find work at the big commercial firms, most of which were barely solvent, because hunting had dropped off, too. At the time, an American taxidermist passing through England called taxidermy a profession fraught with apathy and isolation. A group of British museum taxidermists, troubled by all this, got together and formed the guild.

In 1976, the guild may have had lofty ambitions, like those of the World Taxidermy Championships, but the people trickling into the hall now—museum, commercial, and amateur taxidermists; people interested in modelmaking and natural history; passionate ornithologists, lepidopterists, and skeleton collectors; people who spend a great deal of time pondering life forms—are exceptionally laid-back. (Had Charles Waterton walked in here, I bet he would have preached fire and animation.) These people are, for the most part, Mayer's friends and colleagues, people she relies on for specimens, reference, and technical advice. At Hirst openings, Mayer is known as a taxidermist who is an artist; here she is known as an artist who is a taxidermist. She's known some of the guild members for more than thirty years. They call her "wild," "artsy," and a bit "daft."

I think about all the changes Mayer must have seen since she joined the guild in 1977: older museum taxidermists have retired and died; younger taxidermists have quit taxidermy to earn a living doing something else. Some of them are at the convention, including Derek Frampton, a former Natural History Museum taxidermist who now uses his sculpting skills to make props and robotic creatures for movies such as the Harry Potter series. He has also prepared study skins and dogs for Tring. "Now I'm one of the senior members," Mayer says with a bittersweet intonation. "At least they haven't kicked me out yet."

The turnout is low this year, only 40 out of 139 paid members (in 1990, the membership was nearly 300). Even so, the group has a camaraderie that Mayer finds genuine and uplifting. "I love the passion and the obsession—you know, the striving for," she says. "And I love the company." Because of this, and because of the college campus, the show feels like a reunion. It is as informal as a pub crawl. The ballot box is a plastic ice cream container. The "trade show" is a trade stand (Jack Fishwick's artificial snow and resin icicles and a table of tanned pelts). The nametags are totally unnecessary—everyone is chummy—but Mayer still growls, "Anyone without a badge is going to get a severe slapping!"

I wander around, listening. No one is talking about shoddy craftsmanship or how it's unnecessary to hunt animals for taxidermy—two topics that perennially come up at guild shows. Instead, I hear this:

"I've seen a bloke undress a girl with a bullwhip."

"I like a little pain."

"Her clothes were on with Velcro. She didn't have a wink on her. Most guys went up to inspect the body. You're talking twenty feet!"

While more people register, Mayer and I sit in the cafeteria, eating our dinner of lamb and potatoes. Unlike the WTC, with its religious revival overtones, there are no place mats with the NRA logo (indeed, many guild members oppose hunting, which in England primarily means foxes). No one says the Lord's Prayer. In fact, no one mentions taxidermy at all except to cancel tonight's slide show: "Given the late hour, we'll go to the bar and relax and have the slide show tomorrow."

The campus bar radiates blue like an aquarium. It has blue walls and blue tables and is lit with fluorescent sconces. It pulses with pop music—Sheryl Crow, the Rolling Stones. I find Mayer drinking pints with her mates, Jack Fishwick and her two assistants, Dave Spaul and Carl Church (both former welders). They exchange kisses, arms draped over each other's shoulders.

I pull up a chair next