Schwendeman's Taxidermy Studio

“The sight of a particularly fine animal, either alive or dead, excites within me feelings of admiration and that often amounts to genuine affection; and the study and preservation of such forms has long been my chief delight.” I’m quoting William Hornaday, the famous Smithsonian taxidermist and animal-rights activist, who wrote this in 1891. But the words could just as easily belong to David Schwendeman. Schwendeman was the last chief taxidermist for the American Museum of Natural History where he worked for twenty-eight years. Schwendeman is in his mid-eighties, long retired, and likely to show up at the taxidermy workshop his father opened in 1921 in Milltown, New Jersey, now run by his son Bruce. Lately, he says he’s lost his dexterity for taxidermy. Indeed, he says he’s skinned his very last squirrel. Then I show up at Schwendeman’s Taxidermy Studio and he’s degreasing a Cooper’s hawk, or sculpting a puma tail, or varnishing a boar’s nose (to give it the “wet” look), or macerating a bison skull to remove the meat. “Macerating bison’s one of the worst smells in taxidermy,” he says with a devilish grin.

Although David’s simulations of nature are unsparingly sober, his own nature is curious and wry. Much to Bruce’s chagrin, women find David charming, though he is pink-complected, rail thin, and complains that his “computer” has a tendency to backfire. He has fleecy white hair and eyes that work like automatic sensors, picking up every chipmunk and groundhog that scuttles past his yard—although he’s as likely to raise them as he is to trap them in a Havahart.

With his khaki shirts and pants, zebra-stripped toolbox, and pocketknife, David resembles the archetypal taxidermist, and that’s exactly what he is. Schwendeman grew up in a taxidermy shop, passionately devoted to the art and science of creating the illusion of life. His fidelity is so extreme, in fact, that he quit school in ninth grade when his biology teacher mistook a starling for a flicker. That was that. He’s sided with the animals ever since.

From outside, Schwendeman’s sleepy little shop resembles every other place on Main Street: a 1930s clapboard with two large display windows. Inside, however, the place brims with natural wonders. It’s motionless zoo. Roughly one thousand dusty-eyed birds and exotic stuffed beasts roost on the countertops and hang from the ceiling and walls. It’s so cluttered with mounted animals (and snake skeletons and strange tools) that no one’s ever bothered to take an inventory. A great blue heron with outstretch wings held in place with long dressmaker pins, sits near a puma that looks ready to pounce. A fluffy Dall sheep seems to have walked through the wall, its hind end hidden from view on the other side.

This is where David commuted to the American Museum of Natural History from for three decades, often with a briefcase concealing dead beavers and shrews and the occasional poison dart frog for the dioramas. Mostly he restored the museum’s great bird halls, lovingly preserving the most wondrous species for millions of people to see.

I first met David in 1994 when I had come home from a safari where I had seen the gory spectacle of hunted animals. Consumed with macabre curiosity, I worked up my courage one day and visited the shop, expecting to find Norman Bates. Instead I found David, sitting in a rocker, a sheet of paper folded in his breast pocket had his latest bird sightings scrawled on it. And the workshop looked as if it hadn’t changed since 1921. I felt as if I had fallen into Dawin’s study; the contradiction between what people often think of taxidermists and the naturalist I eventually knew David to be, pulled me in and made me want to know more about this art form that is often maligned. 

To understand David you have to understand his deep devotion to wildlife, especially birds. David is a purist: a birder’s birder. He loathes the term “bird watcher,” for instance, because it implies lists and rarity. David would rather observe a common species a million times just to see sunlight hit its covet feathers, than to see an exotic species for a nanosecond and then race off to see the next one. For David, the walk counts more than the birds. In this he’s the definition of the old-school taxidermist—a field naturalist who believes the only way to replicate animals is to first study them in their native haunts.

The first day I met him, however, he wanted to talk about eating bald eagle. (He was preserving an eagle that was hit by a truck for a nature center.) Taxidermists love to joke about eating the specimens, especially if they are rare, endangered, or politically charged. So what does it taste like? I asked.

He looked up at me and chuckled. “Like bald eagle."

Melissa Milgrom is the author of Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy, reviewed in Audubon's May-June 2011 issue.