When people think about taxidermy
they often think of a shed or a workshop and
everything's covered in blood.
People always ask me about the eyes,
are the eyes real?
I don't give them names.
Sometimes the people who they came
from give them names.
My name is Lucy Mascot and
I'm a natural history conservator.
I work at the Lancashire conservation studios.
I'm responsible for the conservation of
taxidermy and biological materials
that are in our museums.
When people ask me what I do
I have to go into lengthy explanations
I usually have to explain to people that
I'm not a conservative either so
people can get confused over the word conservator.
One of the main issues for
taxidermy is that there are composite objects.
They're made out of lots of different things
The skin, in itself is a huge challenge to preserve.
This is a project I'm working on at the moment for
the Grant Museum off Zoology at UCL.
It has a lot of tears and splits in the skin.
Around the face there's some surface cracks
There's a really large split in the groin here
so we'll have to put in some filler inside there
and probably humidify the skin so that we can
bring it back together without it pulling apart.
Got a koala bear here.
There are some holes in him,
the bottoms of the claws as well are very damaged.
These will be the original stitches.
They are not holding them together at all
This woolly monkey, who has undergone
quite a lot of conservation work.
There's still quite a considerable amount of work to do here.
A lot of the chemicals we
work with the hazardous.
Arsenic, lead, mercury, that might be on the skins.
Natural history collections have historically been quite
poorly looked after
Particularly as taxidermy goes through
periods of unpopularity.
So we want to preserve them and make sure that they can continue being used in our museums.
Taxidermy was very popular in Victorian times
and a lot of the people who were
practicing would have definitely have been self-taught.
You can get all types of stuff inside,
so this one is stuffed with just dried grasses
this one has a cork inside and then is stuffed with
cotton wool and that's quite common.
Cotton wool is really acidic
it can cause the skin to degrade.
Sometimes stuffed with sand and peat
so they're really heavy.
I often get asked, are the eyes real?
And yes, no the eyes aren't real.
They're made out of glass usually
you can get acrylic eyes nowadays so
I have a large collection of eyes for
whenever I need to replace eyes and specimens.
I can show you inside the freezer.
When you are in this line of work people know
that you collect dead animals.
So people tend to see things and they'll send me
a message saying do you want this?
My newest acquisition is this Canada Goose
that my husband picked up for me this week.
My husband was actually on his lunch break
he was wearing his suit at the time
and he went and picked this up and just put just
popped it in some bin bags so he would get it home
and freeze it as quickly as possible
because I have some freezers at home as well.
As you'll see, it's still in really good condition.
When the specimens are prepared for taxidermy,
we'll make an incision down the abdomen here
and remove the insides.
Usually the only bones that would be left inside a piece
of taxidermy would be the skull.
The whole skeleton would very rarely be completely left.
There's this misconception that taxidermy is stuffed.
That you've made an incision and then you've stuffed
lots of newspaper or tissues or something inside.
But actually what the taxidermist would actually do
is create a form and then arrange the skin over it.
So you'll defrost them and you'll take measurements,
all along the abdomen.
We're trying to get something as near to the actual size,
of that specimen itself.
This form will be a stout or a weasel
It's like any job really. It's a job that I come to every day,
and you get funny looks but there's huge
misconceptions around taxidermy.
It's not seen as an ethical practice nowadays.
Of course going out and shooting animals
nowadays is unethical and I completely agree with that,
but for a start we're dealing with historical taxidermy.
Most taxidermist nowadays have an ethical
practice and deal with animals that died
of natural causes.
I love animals I think any taxidermist have a huge love
of the natural world and people are always
going to have this morbid curiosity.
I don't think that will ever go away.
So, I think taxidermy will be sticking around
for a long time yet.