Ologies with Alie Ward - Nassology (TAXIDERMY) with Allis Markham

Episode Date: April 28, 2020

Glass eyes! Pelts! Antlers! Hides! Bones! Tanning! Hilarious, charming and globally celebrated taxidermist Allis Markham chats about her passion for preserving animals for museums and institutions. She’s won multiple awards for her artful poses and meticulous work as an ethical taxidermist. With her flair for vintage styling, is perhaps the most elegant badass on planet Earth. Learn the process of making museum taxidermy, her favorite pieces she’s ever made, the best diorama halls, how to DIY it at home, the dos and don’ts of picking up roadkill, why she’s not a fan of 'crap taxidermy' and if ...humans could theoretically be ... stuffed. She is a living dream, this woman. To learn more about Allis and her work, see PreyTaxidermy.com Follow Allis Markham at Instagram.com/allis and Twitter.com/allismarkham A donation went to ConservationAmbassadors.org Sponsor links: kiwico.com/OLOGIES; StitchFix.com/OLOGIES; 1-800 Contacts (1-800-266-8228) or 1800contacts.com More links at alieward.com/ologies/nassology “Stuffed” documentary! Transcripts & bleeped episodes at: alieward.com/ologies-extras Become a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologies OlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes and STIIIICKERS! Follow twitter.com/ologies or instagram.com/ologies Follow twitter.com/AlieWard or instagram.com/AlieWard Sound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media & Steven Ray Morris Theme song by Nick ThorburnSupport the show: http://Patreon.com/ologies

Oh, hey, it's that extra in the movie who accidentally looked right at the camera twice, even though he was told specifically not to. Ali Ward. Back with a new episode of an old, old, old ology. So I have had this topic in my sights for years after once in my 20s at like midnight in my studio apartment, I found myself using a hacksaw to cut into a skull over a bathtub. My cousin had found a deer skull in a field and I was trying to mount just the antlers. It's no way to do it.

But that brings us to this week's gorgeous and gory and storied art of taxidermy. That's right. So there is an ology for that, thrillingly. But first, let's thank the Patreon club at patreon.com slash ologies for making the show possible, rain or shine, and sending in their questions. It costs as little as 25 cents an episode to join that. And thank you to everyone who's been telling friends about the show and who's rated and subscribed, which keeps us up in the charts.

And of course, for the folks that leave reviews for me to read on the darker days, like these fresh ones, Elania Cotta said that they made it through the entire back catalog. Congratulations. And Krista288 says they listened to 99 episodes while sewing fabric face masks. Okay, Nesology. We're going to do it. So this is a real ology and it means the science of stuffing animals for display. It's also called taxidermy.

And I looked hither and dither and tither and y'all, I could not find the etymology of this one. I'm guessing it comes from Nass, Latin for nose or from the Germanic Nass for wet. So perhaps it's the study of wet skin. God only knows. I don't. But I have known this Nesologist for years and I visited her studio here in LA. I have two dead quail in my freezer for her.

They were sadly window strikes. They'll be put to good use. I'm excited to give them to her. She is known as an ethical taxidermist. She deals with animals who died of natural causes or of reasons not for the sake of stuffing. And she runs a business called Prey Taxidermy and they offer classes and she handles just a veritable arc load of animals preserved for museum collections and for institutions. And she was really beautifully captured in last year's documentary Stuffed, which is

gorgeous. She has carved a niche as like a badass darling of the taxidermy world. She's earned her ranks through just meticulous work and these artful mounts and state and world championship titles. She also, just side note, looks like a raven haired bombshell on like a 1950s movie poster and is usually dressed with some kind of vintage flair and perfect eyebrows, but she swears like a sailor and she laughs like sunshine and preserves roadkill as a career. She is, in a word, everyone's dream woman.

So despite the two frozen birds taking up precious pizza space in my freezer, we last met up virtually from our houses about a mile apart and this episode is just a glorious mix of nature appreciation and real talk and warning. You will hear details of how a dearly departed specimen goes from like a soggy corpse to stunning art and it's no worse than what you do when you're preparing chicken for dinner, but it will make you appreciate your next stroll through a museum that much more. Now sharpen your scalpels, fasten your aprons. For a chat all about following dreams and attention to detail, animal conservation, flesh, crap

taxidermy, seal blubber, antique ornithology, leaving the tech world for Victorian artistry of yore and what it's like to date someone who has freezers full of dead stuff. With globally lauded taxidermy icon and nasologist Alice Markham. And so, nasology is a term that you'd heard of but people told you was too old to use? Yeah, so it's not used a lot. I really like it and I heard it before very early in kind of researching taxidermy and wanting to, you know, learn this kind of dead art, if you will, and I read about the term. It was actually in an old taxidermy textbook and there is such a thing.

And then I kind of had asked a few people, mostly like commercial taxidermists at the little taxidermy school I went to in Montana and they were like, where did you hear that? No one says that anymore. And so yeah, it just kind of got lost a little bit to the ages but I think it should have a comeback. Yay! And how did you end up going to taxidermy school in Montana? Like were you the kind of kid that was finding dead stuff in ravines or were you like an

indoor kid? No, me and my sister joke that when we grew up we had one toy and it was called outside go. That's what we had. We, you know, so I grew up in Indiana and also Florida and we just had nothing but the great outdoors and we really, me and my sister, we always liked bugs and I was always found fascinated by animals and I was always finding animal bones or bits of skin or, you know, whatever it is, fur and was always so fascinated by it.

And so I really grew up with a lifelong love of nature and also science. I really loved science growing up. Yeah, I ended up going to school a little bit for anthropology, got into marketing, had this whole other career where I worked for Disney. I was the director of social media strategy and then I just kind of lost my marbles. And I did, I really did, it was not a good work environment for me, it was what I fell into. But, you know, it's funny, I had been collecting taxidermy and collecting all of these little

natural history, you know, creating my cabinet of curiosities, which is so much, I have so much in common with my taxidermy students. Paula says that she was always an outdoor kid, romping through fields and searching for bones and dead things in the wilds of her Indiana upbringing. But when did the taxidermy bug first enter her life? Like when did you really get that first butterfly? You know, I remember when I first moved to New York, so I used to live in New York, I moved there at like 18 years old for college and I went to the Natural History Museum.

And so the American Museum of Natural History and it just, it was like I was in church, but like a church I was like excited for and on board for, it was just like everything was like mahogany and quiet and then you look up and these amazing dioramas and I had just never seen anything like that. I'd grown up around taxidermy, you know, it was a thing, but not like this. When I moved to New York, I knew one person there and I moved there in the summer and so I spent the entire summer learning that place like a back of my hand and I didn't know anyone in New York, but I knew that museum and I would take people on little impromptu

tours like I would just kidnap like tourists and I did this. I was like weird kid and I just, I knew that museum and then when I moved to LA a number of years later, I fell in love with our museum here and the dioramas here and I just always wanted to work in museums. And so finally, you know, when I lost my marbles at Disney, I asked myself if I could do anything, what would it be? And I was like, I want to work in museums and I want to, I think I want to be a taxidermist and I just, and then I was like, you know what, I'm just going to do it.

It was just this wild hair that I got and every day I wake up with that same wild hair and go to work. I wonder if anyone does classes, I wonder if I could learn this anywhere. And so I found this little school in Montana. We were only four students and I just did like a short two week program. So this was the Advanced Taxidermy Training Center in Thompson Falls about 100 miles northwest of Missoula and I just looked it up on a map and I realized that my 2009 Ward Family Reunion was only about 15 minutes away and now I'm hella pissed and I didn't know about this

place sooner. And it was enough to get me started. It was more geared towards what we call commercial taxidermy, you know, doing, you know, your white tailed deer, your, you know, your skunk or whatever it is, like things like this, which is considered, it's also called trophy work. And that was not exactly what I wanted to do. I really wanted to do museum taxidermy. I got back down to LA and kind of stalked Tim Bovard, who's the museum taxidermist at

the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. And I mean, seriously, like I figured out like his email address and like, you know, I really stalked him and got him to agree to meet with me, then got him to agree to let me volunteer and then I just showed up like every day. I think at some level he was too embarrassed, like not to hire me. So. And tell me a little bit about Tim. I understand that he is like the original dude at the Natural History Museum.

What kinds of things did you learn from him? And does taxidermy have like a lot of apprenticeships? Is that how it's kind of passed down? Yeah. So taxidermy is one of those things where it is very old school and you you do end up hopefully in an apprentice mentor situation. Definitely to this day, like he'll always be my mentor. I, you know, I call him my taxidermy dad.

I will literally call his house and his wife goes, Tim, your daughter's on the phone. Yeah, he's just he first off, he's the most amazing, kind, curious, patient, just lovely person you'll ever meet. I want to put him in his own little diorama and keep him for a while. But he's wonderful. And so what it what it really is with learning is that in taxidermy, we're preserving animals, and that's like saying, we are painting pictures. There are so many different ways to do this, this art slash this science.

So you're learning first the way that your mentor wants to you to learn it, you know, the ways and then they'll kind of, in my experience, Tim really widened the scope. He's like, OK, this is the 400 year old technique for doing birds. We're going to use wrapped bodies. We're going to, you know, just put clay and here are the eyes, whatever. And from those wrapped bodies that you might see in collection drawers, she moved on to carving body shapes and casting heads and just up and up the

ranks of difficulty and artistry, learning from the masters as she went. I have gone and trained with other taxidermists. So I've gone down to Texas and worked with Danny Owens. I've gone up to Canada and worked with Ken Walker. I've gone to Europe and learned from, you know, people like Peter Sunson and Jack Fishwick. I'm sure these are all names you all know, right? Funny because they're really famous in taxidermy land.

But then you kind of take all these techniques that you've learned from different people and you do what works for you. So I have taxidermy students and I always tell them the only wrong way to do it is to say there's only one way. That's how I feel. And walk me through basic taxidermy because I think that a lot of people think that you take the skin of an animal, you stuff it with newspaper, and then you sew it back up on the bottom.

And I have a feeling that that is not what happens. Oh, that hurts my soul to hear that because I know it's true. It's so true. Yeah, they either think what you just said or they think I'm like an undertaker or a mortician. And I use like formaldehyde and crazy chemicals. And neither one of those things are true. But basic taxidermy is this.

You start with prep, aka deconstruction. So I will have an animal and let's say it's a mammal. And it comes to me dead and it comes to me, generally speaking, frozen and bagged. I have visited her studio and she has so many phrasers just filled with the gills with bags containing frosty birds, beavers, foxes, dead raccoons. I saw an heirloom swan preserved on ice since 1976. She probably got a warthog.

They're stillborn tiger cubs and more just waiting in the chilly wings until it's their time to shine in the glow of her preservation techniques. And so I have my frozen animal and I will let it thaw out a little bit. I still like to keep it cold, right? We like to be like a butcher shop. The colder you have the meat, the less it's going to break down on you. And I'll take a whole bunch of measurements. You know, I will take, you know, eye to nose measurement, length of the tail,

length of each limb, each individual joint to joint. We have all these crazy measurement sheets. I take photos, you know, getting myself as much reference as I can on this animal. And then we're going to remove the skin. So, um, I've heard this described before by other taxidermists. I'm going to borrow it. Um, imagine you're skinning an orange. So the rind just kind of comes off and you want to try to do that in as few cuts

as possible, right? So we're kind of skinning it, removing that rind, right? And all the nice juicy stuff on the inside that Pes would just love to eat. That's got to go bye-bye. So I'm not actually going into any of the organs, anything like that. I'm essentially removing the skin like you would take off a hoodie or a onesie, right? And so, um, there's a few different incisions you can do. You know, as I like to say, um, there's more than one way to skin a cat.

So that phrase and variations of it, by the by, has been in use since the 1600s. And some think that it originated with the skinning and burning of witches. And thus they're suspected pets, cats. But this led me down a real asshole. And I just learned that dried and posed dead cats were sometimes hidden in house walls as protection from evil spirits. So if you live in an old house and have great luck, there might be a really old dead cat in your wall.

Anyway, Alice has to skin the animal and then use what's aptly called a flesher, which is a motored grinder type of gadget that scrapes leftover muscle and membranes from a hide. So imagine using like a power tool, but instead of sanding down wood, it just flex flesh off. And then the skin itself has to be preserved. In the case of a mammal, we're going to turn that skin into leather. And that is a process known as tanning.

And it's not the kind of tanning we do on the beaches here in California. But it's a chemical process from turning raw skin into leather. And tanning for humans goes back. Oh, I don't even want to guess because I never became that anthropologist, but probably 10,000 years. In fact, you can tan an animal with its own brain. And yeah, it's called brain tanning. And a fun fact of that is every animal has enough brain to tan its own skin.

Yes. OK, quick aside. Yes. Egyptians thousands of years ago would preserve all kinds of animals. Even hippo mummies have been found. And also brain tanning works by boiling brains with water and then applying that as a paste to the hide. There's like an oily lecithin in the brain that moisturizes the collagen

in the skin to make it pliable and preserved. But there are other methods of preserving skin that involve letting it soak in pee or in a solution of pigeon droppings. Alice may have a flare for vintage aesthetics, but yeah, that's that's not what she does. The type of tanning I do, it's actually it's really fun. You get into organic chemistry with this. But it is called immersion tanning. It actually creates an ionic bond.

So it's yeah, it's really cool. So first it goes, the skin goes into an acid pickle. And I know it sounds really, really scary. Like, oh, my God, you're playing with acid. It's really not. I use a formic acid and formic acid. I diluted enough that it gets down only to two on the pH scale. And just to give you an idea of the pH scale, like seven is neutral.

Anything above that is alkaline, the opposite of acid. And then below seven, in order to like burn your face off, it would be like a negative 10 or something like that on the pH scale. So I could give myself a little bit of a chemical burn, but we're pretty safe around the studio with gloves and masks and all of that. So but yeah, it goes in this acid pickle, which is essentially a big bucket with some salt and some acid. And what the acid does is it stretches out the molecules of the skin.

So we're actually changing the skin on a molecular level. So it's stretching out that molecule and it's making space for a new ion. And so after it's been in the pickle for like a week, two weeks, six months, if you're doing a cow, then yeah, you pull it out and you can then put it in another bucket. Now it'll sound sciency, but it just looks like buckets. And then we have some salt in there as well. We always have salt in the water because salt is hydrophobic.

And so it's going to let the skin absorb some of the water, but not too much of it. The salt is kind of like puts the brakes on the skin, getting too much moisture. And so then what happens is you add the commercial term for it is Lutan F. And it's an actual little ion and it goes into the molecule and zap. All of a sudden, it's no longer raw skin, it's leather. No way. Yeah. So we make our own leather.

Only it has like eyelids and claws and foot pads. So yeah. Wow. And now tanning it also protects it against pests and decomposition. Yeah, absolutely. So the first thing it's going to take care of is the decomposition. So obviously the raw skin is a really unstable, you know, the proteins. Everything's breaking down when you're talking about a raw skin. It's also a breeding ground for bacteria, right?

You've got moisture, you've got heat, you've got all of these. So it's going to be very attractive to bacteria growth and also pests. But when you tan it just like a leather jacket, you know, it is it is much more stable. It's not breaking down anymore. It's got this artificial ion in there that has really stabilized that molecule. Now, one thing I do stress to my my clients, which are almost completely museums, nature centers, et cetera, you know, moths and beetles, which are the common pests that do go after taxidermy, they can eat that.

They can absolutely eat it, especially the little hair follicles going into the fur. So by tanning it, we've made it not attractive to pests, but just like a sweater, wool sweater hanging in your closet, you know, moths can go after that. They can certainly go after taxidermy in a museum or in your home. So don't add random dirty stuff from outside to your precious collections without doing a little bug management first. And if you're going to DIY it, you got to scrape all the fat and the flesh off. And while in the old timey days, they may have stuffed these

hides with newspaper or horsehair or even Spanish moss. Modern day taxidermists don't stuff them. Nope. But no, today what we are doing, we are not stuffing them. In fact, in in taxidermy world, if you say, oh, you stuff animals, that is like the biggest dirty word you can say. Like we, it's nails on a chalkboard to us. Oh, yeah. You know, it's sad, though, that the term, the preferred nomenclature is mount.

We mount animals. Oh, that doesn't sound any better. No, it doesn't. What are, is it foam underneath? Because I understand that if you say do trophy taxidermy, you can buy certain mounts that are like an elk buck and a doe deer. So you can buy these kind of pre fab ones. Yeah. How much are you using those versus having to sculpt those down to fit

particular dimensions? Yes. So that's exactly right. What's inside is called a form or a mannequin. It's basically a sculpture of the animal that the skin is going to go over. Now it has to fit, hopefully. So there are what we call commercial forms and there are taxidermy catalogs. By the way, I highly recommend you go on some of these websites, especially if you're into Halloween or sculpting or taxidermy.

And you can actually take the measurements of your animal within reason and you can go on these websites and you can look up your animal, you find the pose you want. Jump jumping, sitting, laying down, or if it's just a game head or whatever. And then you can find a form that might fit your specimen. Now, for me, that's not always so helpful. For one, I work on things that a lot of people do not work on because they are protected by the federal government. So I've worked on endangered animals, protected animals.

You know, I heard in one of a couple of your episodes, people mentioning the black-footed ferret, I have worked on black-footed ferrets and I can tell you there is no black-footed ferret commercial form because there's only 700 black-footed ferrets alive. So for me, I end up making a lot of mine custom. And so what that looks like is I remember I talked about, we do all these measurements and photos and all of that. So I've got a few different options here.

I can take my measurements and the carcass of the animal and I can take some foam. You know, it's not quite like styrofoam. It's more like insulation foam. It's called polyurethane foam and I can carve the animal. So I can work in a subjective way of sculpting. Right. And I can start carving that. The other thing I can do is I can take my carcass and I can make a mold of it. So now we get into molding and casting, which is one of my very favorite things to do now.

Yeah, this is where I'm talking about these these advanced skills that I got to learn from my mentor and even some other people. And so what I'll do is I'll take the carcass and I'll freeze it in the position that I'm going to want this animal in. And so I will I'm going to talk about a specific one now. I did a baby harbor seal and so adorable. This is for the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History and it's there now in one of the dioramas.

OK, side note, I looked this silvery spotted harbor seal up on Alice's Instagram and it's just a cute little muffin at once. Both small and a chunk. And she's about to describe the process of preserving it for science. And remember, it passed away naturally and the museum is putting it to use educating people about marine ecology. And so I got this baby harbor seal that unfortunately did not make it. And so, oh, my God, what a chubby little cuteness.

And so I, you know, skinned him out, did that whole process, was tanning the skin. And while that's all going on, I have this baby harbor seal without skin on it. So I kind of put him in the basic position that I knew the museum and their mammologist wanted to have this in. And so one of them, like looking up at the viewer and so I froze him in that position and then I took fiberglass and I like essentially you're like dumping a fiberglass resin mixture over the carcass. And so that fiberglass sets up and it's nice and hard.

Nice. And so then what I did was I took like a spiral saw and I cut a, you know, cut the fiberglass shell so I'd be able to pop it open. I removed the carcass of my baby harbor seal. So, you know, essentially the harbor seal without its skin on it. I removed that and now I have a mold, right? So I have all this negative space. I have this shell.

I've rejoined the shell, added a bottom to it. And then I took this foam that I'm talking about. It comes in liquid form. There's an A and a B and it's this expanding foam. So you got an A and a B. You mix it together. You stir it all up and it starts to expand and then it hardens. And so it's really cool stuff to play with.

But if you get it in your hair, you're going to cut your hair. It's horrible. So, I don't know if this has happened to you. This happened to one of my assistants and I was like, oh, honey, oh, sweetness, you're getting a haircut. So that is a lesson learned. Let's do a makeover. But yeah, and so you pour that A and B mixture, mix it all up, throw it into your

mold, it expands, and then you pop out a little replica of that carcass, right? So I had a little replica of what this or, you know, same size, exact to scale replica of what this this baby harbor seal was. Only it's made out of this lightweight foam. That's amazing. And yeah, we have something that is going to custom fit the skin that you're tanning. Well, here's the difficulty, harbor seals and everything else. There's a lot of fat I had to remove off of that skin, right?

I like I said, this was a little chubby cuteness. So all of the fat goes with the skin. So now I've got a very skinny version of what that baby harbor seal was. So then I went back to my measurements. This is where we get into math, which I actually really love. So I measured what I have on the foam. So like, let's just they have these little rolls back behind their neck, these little fat rolls, especially when they look up.

So I took measurements of, you know, the entire circumference going down the body. And I was able to say to myself, oh, man, I'm missing like 15 millimeters of fat all around here. So I ended up adding that back. So I put some foam on there. I carved it back down. I started putting like foam on it in various places, carving it to those

measurements, right, and adding all these little fat rolls. So I had to look up on my computer, right? I go on like Google images and Flickr. And I found all these images of baby harbor seals that are alive. And if I've got him in this little position where he's looking up, where are those fat rolls going to be? And how many fat rolls are there to make him look like this little alive chunker that I need him to be?

So that's what I did. And then are you sculpting that on top of that polyurethane cast that you've made? Exactly. So I'm taking more of that A and B polyurethane. I'm pouring it on top of there. I'm letting it dry and I'm kind of taking files and wrasse and I'm shaving it into essentially sculpting it into what that shape needs to be so that I gave him those little, you know, those little fat rolls and and just all of that back.

And so from there, once I kind of had this, I can always take the skin and I can pull it out of those buckets, that pickle that I have it in. And I can do what's called a test fit, just like you trying on clothes. My little baby harbor seal had to try on his body. Yep. So I see if it fits. And what do I think of that and how does it look? And then I needed to do other things too, because that little face, think about it. How much fat is in our cheeks?

If you just touch your cheek right now, right? Yeah, a little more than before the bread episode. So under your chin, right? Even your forehead, right? Your eyebrows, you have these little muscles there and some fat. So I needed to make sure that he had that. So one of the things that I did before I skinned him is I took what we call a death mask. A death mask, casual.

Death masks are essentially you take a mold of a face of a dead animal or in some cases, people, I think even like there's a death mask of Abraham Lincoln. What I did was I took a mold of the face before I did anything. So what I used to make that mold is there's a material called alginate. Alginate is if you go to the dentist and they make a mold of your teeth. It's a very pliable, it's non-toxic, very soft mold material. And essentially, I mixed a whole little bucket of alginate and I just dipped his face in there and alginate sets up like we call it when it kicks,

when it hardens in like 10 minutes. And so I had his and it won't pull any of the hair out generally. So I knew I was going to be able to get a copy exactly of his face without damaging that skin. So I had him in the alginate 10 minutes. And then I just carefully backed his face out of the alginate and then into the alginate, I poured in plaster and then 10 minutes later, I take out the plaster, which is now an exact replica of his face that we call a death mask. And so if you and it's the cutest thing,

if you go on my Instagram and you scroll down, you can actually see this entire process. So for visuals, see Instagram.com slash Alice, where she's posted a step by step of this process, including casting the seal's face and making a replica out of that in polyurethane foam and then sculpting it down a bit to make room for clay additions to kind of finesse the expression. But I was, if you can imagine now,

I've made that sculpture of the body. I've got all the little fatness and everything like that. And now I've got that face on there, which is an exact replica. And I use the same type of foam to essentially glue all these parts together. And so now I'll put the skin on again for another test fit. Check it, right? We're trying on our skin to make sure it's all going to look cute. That's a great look for you. And the next thing we'll try on is the eyes.

Oh, yeah, this really brings it to life. I'm so curious about this. So taxidermy eyes are made out of glass or acrylic plastic. So they are completely fake. You can't use real eyeballs. And there are different taxidermy eye companies. This is what they do for a living. They make taxidermy eyes and they are really cool.

I have so many eyeball drawers at my studio. I can't even tell you. Oh, my God. And so now how do you get the skin to stick onto the form when you're ready? Like, are there seams that we can't see? Yeah, there are. So like I said, whenever you skin something, you're going to do it in a way that you're not going to be able to see the stitches.

So I knew before doing this baby seal what the pose was going to be. So it was going to be laying on its belly, looking up at the viewer. So I made the seam exactly my incisions exactly where that it was going to be sitting on the ground. So I got the eyes, I put them on clay with the form and then I will take a glue. We call it hide paste and I put that all over the form. So we're going to put a hide paste all over our sculpture. It's nice and wet and we're going to take clay and we put it down inside each one

of the digits, yes, seals, sea lions, all that. And they may look like flippers, but they do have individual little digits. And so that is all filled with clay. It's just like a glove. Now we're going to take the skin and we lay it over our sculpture. So the head goes on like a little hoodie and the rest of it. It's just like putting on a onesie, right? And so that onesie goes on.

And instead of zipping it up, I use it's called fire line. I think it's for fishing. I've never used it for such, but it's like a monofilament and we sew it up. So it all gets sewn up. And so after that, you will. This is where the taxi comes into taxi. Dermi, because taxi means a range or movement and Dermi is dermis. And so I'm, yeah, right.

And so now I'm going to push it down. I'm going to push that skin and move it around and finagle it to wherever it needs to be. And so in the case of this little harbor seal, I had to put it into the little folds, right? These little chunker folds and things like that. So you're most sculpting the skin where it needs to be from the outside. But for a lot of mammals like bobcats, mountain lions, deer, you know, kudu, we end up putting these little liners inside the ears so that they're,

they won't fold and all of that. And now the face, this is the hardest part, is getting the face right. Because where do people look when they look at taxidermy? They look at the face, they look at the eyes. Yeah. So now we get to what we call tucking. You actually will take the lips and you put on your form, you make a slit and you're going to end up tucking the skin into that slit inside the form. So this process, she says, is called splitting the lips.

And Alice helps shape them with clay. It's kind of like Juvederm, but taxidermy, which then makes me wonder if the science of getting injectables to look younger should just be called Juvedermy. Anyway, Alice is careful about the shape of the mouth. Oh, because you have to do these very, very subtle movements in the lips to kind of show like relaxation or fear or delight or or like, exactly.

Exactly. And if we do open mouth, then we have to do it to an even more extreme degree. If we're doing something open mouth, we never use the real teeth. So you have to make an artificial jaw set with teeth and all of that. Wait, why did they ditch the teeth? The reason we don't use the real teeth is teeth are used to being in a moist environment. And if we take them out of that environment because it's dead, the enamel breaks down and they start to crack and fall out.

So I didn't know that. Yeah. So just like we make a mold, I talked about making a death mask. We will then make a mold of the teeth and the gums and even the tongues. And you can make copies of all of that from doing jaw sets for for myself, which which I'll do with open mouth things like I had to do in a little bitty Island Fox for the Santa Barbara Natural History Museum. And it was like snagging a berry. And, you know, there's Island Fox are protected.

So there's no jaw set for that. They're really tiny. And so I made my own using dental acrylic. And so, yeah. And so it's really cute, all of that. But I had to do it. It's super tiny little jaw set. But that way it doesn't break down over time.

Imagine an open mouth mountain lion, right? And it's got those those that snarl and the nose where the muscles are going to pull up. Hearing about how much science and sculpture is in her work, I realized I totally neglected to ask her about that. And the cheeks and the flair of the whiskers, all of that. You've got to sculpt that with clay from the outside. And you've got to get that lip to sit. You know, the lower jaw will be very taunt.

And then the upper lip, right, is going to be pulled up and you have to shape that. And this is a stupid question. But was your background in studio art before this? I mean, you have to be a really good artist to be a taxidermist. How did you get so good at this? Oh, you know, I'm always learning. I'm always learning. I hope I'm good at this.

But I. Yes, you are. You've won so many awards. There's like documentaries about you. Like you're like one of the best taxidermists in the world. Oh, my gosh, thank you. How did you get? How do you develop that skill?

And are you really good at pumpkin carving? OK, first off, I'm an amazing pumpkin carver. I know I'm first and foremost. But yeah, you know what? I learned this from my mentor, Tim Bovard, and from many, many others. So I've been doing this only for about 10 years now. And I think what's really helped me develop is to gain an eye is to not make any assumptions, right?

So I don't assume I know what a cat looks like, right? I go to my measurement sheets, I go to my death masks, I go to reference that I'm looking at on the computer and I look at live animals when I'm working on something and I do this every time I'm currently working on a gray fox. I have done so many gray foxes, but I always have my reference there, not just for that fox, but for looking back at reference photos every time. Because it becomes a game of telephone. If I make an assumption on this gray fox, ten gray foxes later, how many have I

made an assumption on and how many new assumptions, right? So then it doesn't even look like a gray fox anymore. Maybe it starts to look like my dog. Now, is that why some taxidermy is just bad? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I think some of it's just bad because of time. A lot of the things that you see out there, you know, they didn't have the kind of tanning that we had, you know, we're only had this foam since the 1970s, right?

Polyurethane wasn't a thing before the 1970s, so they were built on burlap and plaster, which takes on moisture and they start to break down. But other bad taxidermy I see, I see a lot of small birds out there, like things like crows or jays that look like ducks. And it's because that taxidermist is a duck taxidermist and I can tell. Yeah, I think, you know, and look, I've been guilty of this myself. I did. First of all, there's a lot of taxidermy at the L.A.

County Natural History Museum that I did early on that I need to drag out and burn. Quite frankly, I did this. It was a what was it? It was a ground squirrel. Thank God it's not on exhibit. And, you know, most of the squirrels that I have seen in my life are fox squirrels. And I'll be damned if that ground squirrel does not look exactly like a fox squirrel. You know, it's got like a big old pointy head, ears sticking straight up.

Like, you know, the whole thing where ground squirrels are really, really different from fox squirrels. And it's so funny to look back at that now. And I'm like, yeah, I did that, you know. But I think I, for one, I had a mentor that told me the truth about it in a very kind way. And I, yeah, he was like really sweet about it. He's like, well, it looks like a squirrel. I don't know about a ground squirrel, but it's got some squirrel qualities.

Like, that's exactly what he said to me. And then over time, he was like, yeah, that looks like a fox squirrel. You know, he's gotten more blunt with me through the years. But, you know, I think the thing is that I like to think of myself as just just stupid enough. I never think that I'm I'm too smart and that I know anything. I like to keep myself not in a self esteem kind of way, but in a humility kind of way. I'll never get as good as Mother Nature. I'm chasing that rainbow and I'm never going to catch it.

It's my job to get as close as possible every time. And the only way to do that is never trust myself, only trust Mother Nature. Oh, that's so smart. Why do we love people's screw ups? Well, at least they're taxidermy flubs. Like, for example, woodland creatures with possessed expressions. What is that really just bizarre looking fox that made the rounds a few years ago? Lord, you know what?

I have I have like eight copies of that book because people I swear to God, if I get another one, I'm going to lose my mind. People keep giving them to me as presents. And I'm like, why? Like, I don't like crap taxidermy. I think it gives us all like a bad name. Yeah, because and I have to fight that a lot, quite frankly. When people think of taxidermy, they think Norman Bates, crap taxidermy.

That's what I get, right? Is there a taxidermist in a movie that you feel like really gets it right? Yeah, my documentary. That documentary stuff is available on many platforms, including Amazon Prime. And I just looked it up on Rotten Tomatoes. 100 percent, that's some hardcore quality right there, my babies. But she's also helped put more fact into fiction. OK, so I did get to do some work for Bates Motel.

So if you look at Norman Bates's later work in the television show, I will say that Norman finally got it right. Thank you very much. Those are my birds. So there we go. Amazing. He turned into a really good taxidermist. Oh, my God, that's amazing that he had he had a couple decades to

to, yeah, perfect his art. What about Flynn Flam? What about myths about taxidermy that you really want to debunk? OK, myths that I really want to debunk. Again, we are not morticians. We are not undertakers. I have a very good friend who is an undertaker and our jobs are nothing alike. We have spoken about it.

What other myths? Oh, you know what? Is that we is that we kill animals for taxidermy? That is the biggest myth. Let me tell you, for one, everything in my personal studio, just because of like, you know, how I am and where I live and whatever and who my clients are. Quite frankly, everything in my studio, it died in reasons unrelated to the taxidermy.

So like that, the baby harbour seal, someone went on my Instagram is like, how dare you kill this and whatever. And I was like, but no, I didn't come a baby seal. So but I take those moments rather than start a flame or back. For me, it's my job in that moment to educate the public. So I was like, hey, just so you know, this came from a wildlife rehab. Unfortunately, like he didn't make it a lot of times.

Sometimes the moms will abandon them. And then, you know, I'm happy I can put this to good use for education. So yeah, so that's the thing. But but you know what? Even so, I will say that deer head on someone's wall. Somebody ate that. Are you kidding me? Somebody went out.

It might be a trophy so that they can remember getting it. But that venison is in that person's freezer. It's also in their neighbor's freezer, their best friend's freezer. Like I have elk in my freezer right now from a friend of mine who hunts. And that that's wild meat. Never lived in a pen. You know, it's the truest form of free range, even with commercial taxidermy. You know, there's not a lot of people out there wasting good meat.

There's just not. Yeah. What about big game like trophy hunting, like safari parks and things like that? Does that ever is that a pretty small amount of taxidermy? That's a very small amount of taxidermy, big game taxidermists. So now we're going to go into some some like real gray areas, right? So I think people have to kind of decide for themselves. For me, I would never want to go out and hunt an elephant or a lion.

Or a jaguar or something like that. But in certain African countries and you just to name some. So like Zimbabwe, South Africa, if these animals don't have a value, then they are considered worthless. And I'll just speak about South Africa for right now. If they are allowing big game hunting of, let's say, a rhino or an elephant. Generally, internationally watched or protected species, they're going to let them hunt a male or a female that is past breeding age.

So a person is paying, you know, sometimes up to a quarter of a million dollars or more in order to hunt that. Then that money can go towards land that that herd can continue to live on. And that's how we have people doing anti poaching work and guarding them, etc. And so to me, I think some of that is a necessary evil. But I don't like to speak about Africa as a continent. It's individual countries and how that money is used and how that that hunting is happening there is individual to that place.

And what about if someone wants to start a taxidermy collection? Should they look for vintage taxidermy? Should they try to find ethically sourced new taxidermy? What's the best place to acquire? Yeah, I mean, so with taxidermy, if you want to start a collection, look, I've got some vintage taxidermy that I really like. And I think it was well done. And I sometimes just like that vintage look to it.

What I would say is first off, make sure what you're buying is legal in your country and in your state. Do you know in California state it is illegal to buy kangaroo or zebra? Yeah, so yep. And as I've recently learned, it's illegal to own a feather unless you're Alice. It is illegal to own any part of the bird, including feathers or their nests or their eggs, those are all protected. So and it is federally protected.

So in order to work on these things, I actually have a federal bird permit. And each one of my clients, the museums or institutions, if they are going to have me do one of these protected birds for them, they have to have a permit and have listed on that permit, each individual bird. So it's more paperwork than you think. So some of the protected birds, you know, listen, so certain things are like fair, fair game, you can totally have them. Pigeons, knock yourself out.

Those are feral, all pigeons are feral. They used to be wild, they're not anymore and they're non-native. European starlings, guess what? They belong in Europe. Go ahead, knock yourself out. But other things like hummingbirds, hummingbirds are completely federally protected. Let's see what else seagulls even any type of seabird, federally protected. And then you get into weird things like crows.

Crows are not protected per se, but you cannot legally buy or sell a crow. Really? I checked this out and yes, it is illegal to take, possess, export, import, transport, sell, purchase or trade any crow or any part of a crow, including its feathers or their eggs or nests without a permit. But what are we talking, like a misdemeanor? Nope, it's felony. Well, for one, these laws were put in place because of women wearing different

things on their hats, etc. Or these things becoming jewelry, especially during the early 1900s. So what we want to do is they don't want to create a market for these things. So basically, if it's pretty and colorful and native to where you live, it's probably illegal for you to have any part of it. Don't bother, don't touch it. And yes, fish and wildlife are going on things like Etsy and eBay, and they will bust you. So, yeah, and the other honestly, I agree with these laws.

I sometimes get people emailing me and I explain to them that it's illegal and they're like, yeah, but just on the down low. And I'm like, no, I'm not going to commit a felony for you. No, and also these laws were put in place to protect our native fauna. And and also my fish and wildlife is one of my clients. So maybe I'd like to keep my job. Yeah. And the other thing I would say is if you're going to get something vintage,

make sure and you're not bringing in something with pests on it. You can put it in the freezer for 72 hours. That's always a good idea. The other thing you can do is put it in a space. You're not using a room or a garage and set off a bug bomb. It will not leave residue on it and you can bug bomb it. Oh, yeah. I had a friend who had a moth and a

termested infestation on her taxidermy collection. She was heartbroken. Yeah, also a flim flam that your studio smells. I feel like I have been there and it was not smelly at all. How do you keep it from stinking? My studio smells like Tabasco and vanilla scented candles. Yeah, if your studio smells, I mean, I'll be honest, there's no way I don't have the cleanest taxidermy studio in the world.

I do. But if your studio smells like you got straight up, you've got problems because that means bacteria is growing and that means it's attractive to pests. My job is to work on things many times, like I've said, rare, endangered things, and then they need to go to museums. They need to be incredibly clean and not attractive to pests. And that means my studio does too. So we bug bomb in there fairly regularly.

I painted my entire studio is white so I can see everything. And I mean, I am living in a world of spray bleach and gloves. So I mean, I am medicated for obsessive compulsive disorder. It is very clean. But it makes you so good at your job. Yeah, it does. I'm like, well, you know, hey, if you if I want to really do well at a competition, I'll just go off my meds, you know?

And you do do so well at competitions. I always am so proud of you whenever I see that you've gotten like a new award. Among those awards, the 2018 California champion getting the judges best in show, the People's Choice Award for the United Taxidermist Association and was recognized in the World Taxidermy Championships as being third in the world. She knows her shit and people just love her for it. So we will pepper her with Patreon questions in a minute. But first, a word from sponsors of the show who make it possible for us to donate

to a different charity of the all just choosing each week. And this week, Alice chose Conservation Ambassadors.org in Paso Robles, California. And Conservation Ambassadors offers permanent loving homes for displaced, abused, abandoned or injured wildlife and exotic animals. And they were also featured in the documentary Stuffed. And Alice says that at times like this, they could probably really use the money to help feed all of their animals. So a donation went to conservation ambassadors.org in her name.

And that was made possible by sponsors of the show, which you may hear about now. OK, your questions. Can I ask you some Patreon questions? Yeah, let's do it. Yeah. OK. A lot of people, Marilyn Stark, Jennifer Alvarez, Amesia Dolez, Stephanie Berhardies and Kayla Jane all want to know if you have a favorite animal to taxidermy.

OK, yes, I definitely do. My favorite animal to taxidermy is so it's definitely birds. I really, really love doing birds. And a lot of taxidermists like to work on really big stuff. Like, go big or go home. And I'm like, no, I'm going to go smaller, go home. So my favorite thing to work on is hummingbirds. I yeah, I actually developed like my own technique for doing hummingbirds.

I got to do like I think I did like 30 of them for this exhibit at the Huntington Library and I did two cases of hummingbirds. They were replicas of John Gold's hummingbird cases from 1851. Yes, I wasn't sure what those were and it turned out a big deal. So John Gold was a British ornithologist and a taxidermist. And in 1851, he exhibited 24 elaborate cases. Each was over two feet tall, made of ebonized wood with this gold trim and inside each one were between five and 15 hummingbirds in this environment of foliage

and flowers and thousands of people came to see them at the Zoological Gardens of Regent Park, including a guy named Charles Dickens, Chucky Dix, who wrote a detailed account that Alice used to recreate the look in her two cases. I even had a wood carver carve exactly what these cases used to be. And then I did all these hummingbirds in them. And now they live at the Moor Lab at Occidental College. But but the jewel of it, the jewel of my eye,

I got I got to do two little baby hummingbirds being fed by their mom. Oh, my gosh, how small are the tools? Are you using dental tools for that? Oh, I use spinal surgery tools. So I work in a 55 degree room on a frozen marble slab. And I keep my tools cold in a like an alcohol slush. And I never, ever touch them with my hands. Only the cold metal tools.

So that's the that's the secret is keeping them really, really, really cold. So and it's fun because the mom is feeding one of the babies with her beak going in the mouth and I've got a little wire in there you can't see. And that's how the mom is suspended feeding them in the little nest. So my God, smart. I went and looked at photos of this little Alan's hummingbird feeding two little fluff nuggets in a nest and baby hummingbirds, by the by, can be less than a gram in weight.

That's lighter than a dime and just about an inch long. So that is some intricate work. And if you're wondering if you can get a crick in your neck, the answer is yes. And in Alice's case, one that required recent surgery. But more on that later. First, what about hot gauze up? Let's get into it.

Just one wants to know, are there any major controversies in the taxidermy world? Oh, my God, every day there's a major controversy in the taxidermy world. Let me tell you. Oh, yeah, we're a tight knit community. There's not that many of us. There's like 700 worldwide that talk to each other all the time. And the the controversies are, you know, people fighting over like which tanning formula is best or, you know, like things like that.

So it's a really, you know, imagine the kind of fights that people get into on Wikipedia pages and now we have this forum on taxidermy.net. And then sometimes over on Facebook and we will fight with each other about the like my nudist little details and it's like, you can't tube your tails. You need to skin them out, you know, just like shit like that. It's so funny and I love it. I never get involved, but I love it. I like to watch a lot of people had questions about ethical sourcing.

Ira Gray, Jesse Dragon, Rebecca Landry, Nizomi Fakui, Ashley Herbal, Roxanne Parker, Aaron Ryan, Graham Tattersall, Bonnie and Donica Hart wanted to know about kind of the ethical aspects, cruelty free specimens and what do you do if you see like an endangered species that's taxidermied in of like a business? OK, so, you know, ethically sourcing things. So like, what are your ethics? You know, are you OK with the specimen?

Like my birds 101 course is European Starlings. European Starlings are non native to where I live, right? The North America and they are killed by through pest control. And so they are shot out of the sky. They're also really bad for our native birds. So do you consider that ethical? I do. I think that and also I'm not sending out someone just to kill these. They are being killed anyway by someone doing pest control and I'm just getting the

dead bodies for other people. They are fine with ordering rats that would be used for snake food, right? And working on those. So is that ethical? So a taxidermist who is doing foxes for their client, their client went out fox hunting, maybe it wasn't necessarily depredation. And that taxidermist is doing it to put food on their table. Is that a good ethic for you?

So I think you really have to ask yourself what's ethical. And you know what I think is totally fine is to ask the taxidermist where they acquired the specimen that is always fine. And then you can make your decision for me. I just I like to work on things that they were in no way killed to be taxidermy. So for me, that means depredation is fine. That means pest control is fine. That means a rancher who's ranching peacocks for their feathers that do fall out.

That means that that rancher has to occasionally kill some of the males because they get super aggressive. So those are the ones I get and I'm fine with that and I do eat the meat. And is it OK if you're going to eat the meat anyway? Right. So just, you know, the other thing I'll say is if it's a deer, if it's an elk, straight up somebody ate it. So just don't even worry about it. So we address this in the acrology and disease ecology episodes about ticks

and Lyme disease and deer populations, but deer populations are swelling in some areas and hunting kills about the same number of deer as would have died being hit by cars, but in a more controlled and safe and less wasteful way. But obviously, if you're looking to get into hunting, do research for your own area and see what fish and wildlife agencies and conservationists say about specific species. And if you want, always, always check your crevices. Check them. A lot of folks, Hollis,

Ayla Taylor, Mackenzie and Brown, Taylor Ballier, Ira Gray, Kylie Mullen want to know what's the hardest animal to preserve? The hardest animal to preserve. Is it ones with thick skins like rhinos or fish? Yeah. So I think every every artist has something that's difficult for them. Some artists are not good at painting people, but they can do amazing still lifes or something for for a lot of taxidermists. They would think like the baby hummingbirds would be really hard.

But for me, I think the hardest thing to preserve would be something really big. Like I can't pick up a rhino skin. You know, those things are usually done in a team when you're going to do something big. It's like, ah, taxidermists, assemble and you bring out whoever you can. I tried to figure out how much a rhino hide would weigh and tanned. One source said one hundred and fifty pounds. So what, with all the flesh still on it, must be like double that, right?

Like three hundred pounds. So big things would be something. But I'll tell you what I have had the the the worst time with. And I hate them and everyone knows I hate them. I hate I hate pocket gophers. I hate them so much pocket gophers are the worst thing ever. First off, first off, they they immediately when they die and I think it has something to do with their metabolism, start to rot and they get these horrible

green bellies, they also smell really bad to me. I, you know, I have dealt with a lot in my career, but I think they smell horrible. And and then you go to skin them and their body is just shaped like a potato. And you're like, oh, I'm supposed to sculpt a potato. And so I call them potato pocket gophers. And then their hair is really short. So it falls out really easy. So for one, they just start to rot on you and all their hair falls out.

So I swear out of if I do 10 of them, if I skin 10 of them, maybe one of them will turn out. So that is the thing I refuse to work on. I just hand it to my assistant and I'm like, I'm not working on this. I hate them. So yeah, I will outsource that every time. So on your shit list. Yeah. And Diane P. Nizomi, Vakui and Mackenzie and Brown, I wanted to know, can you get any pathogens from working on any animals, any like diseases or ticks

you have to look out for? Well, I'm not going to get the coronavirus for sure, because I'm all alone in my studio, which is nothing but spray bleach and gloves. But yeah, you can actually. So a lot of the danger with catching things would be if they were fresh and not frozen, by the way, California state, it's illegal to pick up roadkill. So you should should always check before you pick up roadkill. It's the fleas on things that you can get sick from.

You can get mnemonic plague. You can get all kinds of things. But also I really worry when I'm working on primates, because we can contract a lot of things from primates, right? It'll pass to us very easily. So that's a situation where it's like mask and double gloves and everything else when you're working on primates. When I work on birds, I don't worry too much unless there have been cases of like

the bird flew around. So I do keep track of all that as well. A lot of mammals, I don't worry too much. But I think gloves are always a good precaution. Right. And Matt Johnson, Sabine Kearty, Julie Baer, Anna Okrasinski, Maddox, and Paige Poe, first time question asker, want to know about poses, how you feel about kind of goofy poses and Paige asked, what's your opinion on posed or dressed

taxidermy specimens where they look like they're doing something specific like mice playing a tiny banjo or rats playing poker or dapper squirrels wearing tiny top hats. Oh, fancy, fancy. Yeah, my thoughts on that are so I do taxidermy workshops and I have a lot of students who are interested in doing that kind of work. And again, taxidermy is an art, just like painting. You can paint whatever style you want, right? And you can you can do stuff really true to life or you can do stuff that's really

out there like a Salvador dolly and taxidermy is just the same. So it's not my cup of tea to make a mouse drinking a cup of tea. But I certainly know people where that is just their jam. And so my only thing with that is like whatever you're going to do, just make sure it's preserved really well and not attractive to pests. And, you know, have a field day. Well, as long as we're talking anthropomorphics, a truly shocking number of people asked Jennifer Bagoulli, Nicholas Kozellis, first time question

asker, Marissa Holtzman, Tyler Q., Kelly Seaman, Maddie Mayer. I wanted to know in Jennifer's words, could you theoretically taxidermy a human being? Oh, you know, it's so funny. I get this question more than you'd think. And really? Yeah, I do. I get this one a lot. So yes, you could. Yes, you could, right? We've got skin, but but here's the here's the kicker.

All right. So you know how I talked about the process where you turn the skin into leather? Yeah. So the skin itself looks like leather. If it's not covered in fur, it's going to look like a handbag. So if I taxidermy you, you're going to look like you spent some days at the beach. Like one of those ladies from the 1970s who put on a lot of Hawaiian Tropic and now, yeah, you're going to look like that. You're going to look dry. However, I have thought about this.

There is an old medical technique that has been used in taxidermy. It's called wax infiltration. And you can also see it at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. If you look at our chimpanzee group and you look at their faces, their ears, and their hands and their feet, they actually took them off those parts with all the flesh on them and not a lot of hair. And they put them in this alcohol solution and this takes like six months to a year. And they slowly, slowly, slowly start adding like more and more.

I'm not going to quite explain this right because I haven't done it, but you make the solution less water and more and more and more and more alcohol. And then you add paraffin wax and you bake it. And the skin is so thirsty from being in all the alcohol that it sucks up the paraffin wax and it infiltrates the skin in the same way that that tanning ion would infiltrate it and it's essentially turning the skin into wax. And it's got that nice, translucent look to it and everything. So if I were to taxidermy a human, I would do that.

And it would take a long time and I would I would need some really big vats and everything. But OK, this next one is just one of my own curiosities that I could not suppress. But how is it to date as a taxidermist? I you know what? I'm going to say I'm newly single and I don't really know because I'm quarantined. I had well, I've been kind of quarantined. I had neck surgery this year. So if you want to know about taxidermy and the injuries you can get is you look down

a lot and you can do a number on your neck. And so, you know, I've been laid up for a little while and not so much with the dating. I am not having a lot of on like online dating look like nobody matches with me because you have to say what you do. And I think people think I'm creepy. So you're like gorgeous and world famous at what you do. It's just a matter of like that just weeds out the people who you wouldn't want to hang with anyway, you know, but who am I going to weed in?

I mean, look, guys have walked away from me when I've told them what I do. So well, they're just they're not our people. I just know they're not our people. I think so, too. I'm super independent. I can like bring home the bacon. I can fry it up and then I can mount it as taxidermy. So whatever.

Oh, my God, whoever. Well, anyone, anyone who dates you, very lucky. I agree. She is the best. I have a couple more questions from from listeners who are falling in love with you by the moment. May Merrill, Mackenzie and Brown, Sam Moody and Nicole who want to know, is there a responsible and respectful way to taxidermy a pet? And how do you feel about it?

Yeah, you know what? I think there is. I personally, I don't really do pet taxidermy. I will do pet bird taxidermy because I feel, you know, when I compete, I compete with birds. I feel very, very, very like well connected to bird specimens and that I would be the person that, you know, could do a very good job on a pet bird to bring out the personality. So I will do that depending on the, you know, the condition of the bird. Because when our pets die, we loved them, we took them to the vet, we did this,

we did that, right? So they're not going to be a freshly dead, you know, blunt force trauma, window strike kind of bird. They're they're going to not look great, you know, they were sick or something. And so you can't always get a good mount. The way I look at taxidermy with pets is this. If you got a German shepherd, I can make you a German shepherd. Now, if you looked at that German shepherd every day of your of its life and you knew

every little nuance, a character, every little expression, all of these things, you know, I'm just making a sculptural representation of your pet. I don't know what it looks like as well as you do. I'll do my very best. And quite frankly, I don't think I would do that great on someone's German shepherd, which is why I don't do pet taxidermy when it comes to cat and dogs. Also, the eyes are made of glass. It's not going to look the same in that way.

So but I do know taxidermists who do. There's precious creature, Lauren Cain. She has a very respectful pet taxidermy business. She's located in Joshua Tree. She does a lot of sleeping poses and she also does like pet cremation and things like that. So I send people to her and I think she, her whole business is pet taxidermy. I strongly feel that she is a compassionate, respectful person. And that this is her calling, not mine.

That's amazing. That's so good to know. So for more on this, you can see preciouscreaturetaxidermy.com. I just found myself on their site staring at photos of people's artfully posed taxidermy chihuahuas and then just glancing over at Grammy and trying not to ball. I mean, I get it. And also, you know, it's beautiful work when you find yourself wanting to gently kiss a dead cat. Which dovetails to RT Ling's question, can you do at home DIY taxidermy?

If you're really feeling up to it, I'm going to feel like that's a no. That's a yes. That's a total yes. Yeah. Yeah. My studio is at my house. Technically, that's at home. I mean, look, it's big and it's industrial and on it's totally separate. But you know, most taxidermists have a home studio. And in fact, in Europe, most taxidermists are what we call hobbyists.

They don't do this for a living. And some of the best taxidermists in the world, by the way, are hobbyists. Because they'll spend they'll spend a month working on one thing, which I can't afford to do commercial taxidermists can't afford to do. And they can really dial down into the nuances of this. So if you do want to try to do taxidermy on your own DIY, whatever, highly recommend it. Again, I teach workshops and I give I tell everybody the supplies that this you

can do this at home, this is how you get specimens. So just for people out there, you know, there's a few really good guides out there for doing it at home. Carl Church, he wrote a good bird taxidermy book. OK, not to be a nosy grandma, pressuring you to have kids for her sake. But when will Alice write a book? I know I got to put down the scalpel and pick up the keyboard, but that's too hard to do.

So but you can find a lot of tutorials on taxidermy.net on the forum. You can go there and there's tutorials. So there's a lot of resources out there. And most things you can get online. You can order all the supplies super easy. And if you're looking for specimens, I get specimens from pet stores. Look, when you have livestock, you get dead stock. That's them that that is a fact.

So there is a pet store. I generally pay 10 to 20 percent of the live value. I have them put everything in bags in the freezer for me. And then I go there every couple of months or so and I get their dead stuff. And they're happy to get something for it, you know, because it's dead anyway. And you know what? Places I've asked have actually not been that creeped out when I've shown up with like, oh, hey, here's like my business card or you just talk to him like a normal

person and like, hey, this is going to sound a little weird, but I'm doing taxidermy. And I would love to get a specimen. And that's the other thing, stuff from a pet store. It's it's not wild. You don't have to worry about like pathogens and things like that. It's going to be much safer. So I really don't want people running around picking up roadkill because it's really not safe to do.

It's really not legal and quite frankly, it's it's mostly not going to turn out. Stuff that gets hit by a car goes through a lot of trauma and bacteria starts working and all of that. It's really difficult to do. So so, you know, and or ask somebody who does pest control or owns a ranch. You never know. OK, that's so awesome. I had no idea.

And that actually answers my next question, which was from Heather Shaver, who wanted to know what do you keep in your car trunk in case you come across some good roadkill, but that's not even up your alley. Yeah, well, I have done that before when I was working at the museum. The museum has a permit. It's called a collection permit only given to institutions in California. So I had a museum badge and I had a pair of gloves. A few guy, a lot of gloves in my car at all times for other reasons.

I'm weird and some trash bags and I had a bag of salt. And so we were looking for one of our exhibits, some roadkill. And I we were looking for feral cats. We didn't want to use somebody's potential cat. That's very sad. And so, yeah, I picked up the roadkill cat and using those items. And I was just coming from a brunch. So I had like a little sundress on all of a sudden.

Ma'am, the cop comes up and he looks at me and his mouth just formed without even any sound. His mouth just formed the shape of why, why? And I was like, I know this looks weird. I work for the Natural History Museum. We have a collection permit from the county. I'm working on an exhibit right now where we need some feral cats and I'm picking this up, let me get you my museum badge.

And so I showed him my badge and I was like, you know, it's legal. He didn't say anything for the longest time. And then he finally said, you know, I do this program with kids. Do you ever do tours? So we ended up doing a tour. Well, that's amazing and you were not arrested. Well, I had the permit legally, but if I hadn't, I just don't even know what would have happened.

Yes, seriously, no. Let's quick aside. In the Corvid Thanatology episode about crow funerals, Dr. Kaylee Swift made a really excellent point about privilege in science and in field work, and it's sadly much easier for some white lady to get away with picking up animal corpses than it might be for other people of different backgrounds, which is why representation is so important and so is equitable treatment by law enforcement.

It matters in STEM and so does acknowledgement of that privilege. So science is for everyone and it sucks that it's not fair. What else sucks? And now, OK, what about what sucks? What is the worst part of being a taxidermist? There must be something that sucks. I always ask. The worst part, the thing that sucks is it's really solitary.

I'm a pretty social person and you are typically working alone. Taxidermy is, you know, it's a quiet job. I like to say all my co-workers are dead. So you're surrounded by by by eyes, but not one of them's alive. That's what I do. I listen to podcasts, audiobooks, things about science. So I just, you know, my hands are working and my mind can can also be, you know, kind of feeling like I'm not so alone, if you will.

But that's why we have such a big group of taxidermists that are connected online. Some of my very, very, very best friends live in one lives in the UK. The other ones, these are my best friends. The other one lives in Australia. I have friends in South Africa. You know, Iowa, New Orleans, we only see each other every two years or so. And so, but we talk on like constantly. And so, yeah.

And, you know, because we ask each other questions. Hey, what's your trick for opening up ears? What's your thing for this? You know, whatever it is. So we actually have a really tight knit, but very spread out community. But yeah, that's what sucks is it's solitary. I do have my assistant, Paloma, who I call my little dove. And so it's just the two of us.

But we do bring on more people like when we were doing the Santa Barbara job, we're doing a bunch of stuff. My mentor came and worked with us. Dakota Rose from Iowa, like we bring people on for things. I even bring on students occasionally. So that's what's great. And I do the classes and I've been teaching a college course at Occidental College. So that's one of the ways I get over the suckage, you know.

Her website, Pray Taxidermy, lists upcoming classes. And she has on the calendar a two day intensive course called Birds 101. That's on Saturday, May 23rd and 24th. But then underneath it, however, in big red type is the note quote on hold due to plague. But you're free to join her mailing list for updates on when classes resume. And OK, this favorites question is going to be a two parter since Alice is just a font of passion about her work. So first, does she have a favorite piece of taxidermy that she has ever seen?

Do you have a favorite diorama in the New York Museum or in the LA Museum? Is there one that you always stop at? OK, I do have a favorite one. This one, I tell you guys a secret. So there is a diorama hall at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. And it has not been open to the public for 20 years. They closed it quote unquote, temporarily. But there is this diorama in there of these Sumatran tigers.

And it is in this strange like so it's in the jungle. And it's this force perspective. Just, you know, it's like you're kind of looking up at this ridge of these two tigers like hiding in there. And it is just absolutely gorgeous. It's a marvel of force perspective. And I am one of the few people that have gotten to see it because it's been closed for 20 years and unfortunately, and I've been talking with the museum

administration, they're actually talking about getting rid of this hall. I know it's a there's a pangolin diorama in there, clouded leopard, African painted dogs, some of them are completely in disrepair. But there's a high number of them that are really good and really amazing. And it's one of four diorama halls in that museum. And so they'd be getting rid of essentially 25 percent of their dioramas. And there are so few diorama halls left in the world, right? So they got rid of them in Smithsonian in the 80s, like all of this stuff.

So I am begging the administration of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. I've actually had a meeting and I am begging them to please not only preserve this hall, but let's restore it. There's an opportunity to maybe even do new dioramas or, you know, whatever it is. But I'm begging them to preserve this. And so if you're a member of the museum and this strikes a chord with you, I do recommend like maybe reaching out to them and letting them know that, like, you'd really like to see Alice Markham's favorite dioramas.

Yes. And of course, the final most difficult question. And now your favorite thing about taxidermy. I don't even know how how are you going to answer this? My favorite thing is what I'm doing now. Is is, you know, it's is getting to educate people is my whole thing. So the two ways I get to do that is, number one,

I get to create these amazing specimens that get people excited about animals. Right? That's educating people. And then another form of educating people is what I'm doing right now with talking to your listeners and talking about the thing that I am so very passionate about. This dying art, if you will, and really getting people to understand this very misunderstood science. So that's kind of my favorite thing. I mean, I think you can tell like I can go for days on taxidermy.

I love it. I love it. You're literally like one of the world's best. Man, I got to get her those quail corpses, not just for science, but also because it's illegal and I need more room for mochi. I think I have over 2000 specimens in my freezer. So I've got a lot to keep me got a lot to keep me busy. That's the great thing. My my work was made for the coronavirus.

Again, it's completely isolated. Everything is sterile. Like, you know, I'm really making the apocalypse work for me. You're doing just fine. I got a side of elk in the freezer. Bottles and bottles of ethanol alcohol like this is, you know, I'm good. Oh, my God, you're so ready. This has been absolutely such a joy.

Well, I really appreciate it very much. I'm so excited for this. Like I say, listen, like whenever there's a new one, I'm like, there's a new oligene. Oh, yeah. So thank you. So ask smart people stupid questions. And you can follow Alice's work at instagram.com slash Alice. She's also on Twitter, Twitter.com slash Alice Markham. Or you can go to pray taxidermy.com to see her work.

And you can check out the stunning documentary stuff for more visuals of her whole world and the taxidermy scene. We are at oligies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at Ali Ward with 1L on both. And there's bleeped episodes for kids. And transcripts are up at aliward.com slash oligies dash extras. And there will be links to all of this plus the sponsors of the show and the charities we've supported in the show notes.

And thank you to Emily White and all the oligies transcribers for making those transcripts available. You're amazing. Oligies merch is available at oligiesmerch.com. And thank you, Bonnie Dutch and Shannon Feltis, sisters who host the comedy podcast. You are that for managing all the merch. Thank you, Caleb Patton, for bleeping our episodes.

Noel Dillworth for being an amazing scheduler and Aaron Talbert for managing the oligies podcast Facebook group. Jared Sleeper does assistant editing and has daily free workouts on his Instagram at noon Pacific every day. And of course, for the sharpest scalpel in the box, Stephen Ray Morris, lead editor, who also hosts the podcast, The Percast, and C. Jurassic Wright, Nick Thorburn wrote and performed the theme music and is in the band Islands.

And if you stick around to Lee and the episode, you know, I tell you a secret and this week I owe you a bidet update. And who boy, howdy toilet hoses. The truly illuminating experience. If you're looking to save toilet paper in these wacky times, highly recommend. If you've been asking yourself, how can I shower one very specific area of my body as many times a day as I want? Well, then a bidet is just waiting for you.

Come on, America. Let's make this a not weird thing to have hooked up to our toilets. Shall we? 10 out of 10. Any who's all next week, more super questions, more confessions, more wonder at the world. Thank you so much for being here. I appreciate you more than you know. OK, bye.

What's wet, man?