"Were you to pay as much attention to birds, as the sculptor does to the human frame, you would immediately see, on entering a museum, that the specimens are not well done. This remark will not be thought severe, when you reflect that, - that which once was a bird, has probably been stretched, stuffed, stiffened, and wired by the hand of a common clown. Consider, likewise, how the plumage must have been disordered, by too much stretching or drying, and perhaps sullied, or at least deranged, by the pressure of a coarse and heavy hand, - plumage which, ere life had fled from it, was accustomed to be toughed by nothing rougher than the dew of heaven, and the pure and gentle breath of air."
Charles Waterton, On Preserving Birds for Cabinets of Natural History, 1828.

As the English naturalist Charles Waterton (1782-1865) makes clear, preparing skins of animals and birds for display has never been a simple process of arrangement. Taxidermy was an act of artistry, requiring a delicate hand and a sensitive touch. For Waterton and nineteenth-century nature lovers, taxidermy was an art form which revealed a deep respect for nature and a fascination with all the exuberant diversity of its fauna. Ideally, taxidermy not only to defended the carcasses of birds from decay, insects, and the ravages of time, but also presented specimens as if they were still alive, preserving the vibrancy of their plumage and the elegance of their form. As Waterton assert, any common clown could “stuff” a bird or, a frequent error of amateur taxidermists, to overstuff the skin. But to craft a specimen which gave some suggestion of the proportions, musculature, and harmony of the whole form “so much admired in animate nature, so little attended to in preserved specimens,” required a great deal of experience not only with a knife, some cotton, and a needle but also with living nature.

Waterton advises that the taxidermist must have a complete understanding of ornithological anatomy and retreat “to the haunts of birds, on plains and mountains, forests, swamps, and lakes” in order to scrutinize each species’ attitudes and expressions. Once you have learnt the precise angle of each bird’s wings, neck, head, and tail, your eagle will be commanding, your magpie will seem crafty, the vulture will show his sluggish habits, and your “sparrow will retain its wonted pertness, by means of placing its tail a little elevated, and giving a moderate arch to its neck.” In short, taxidermy was the aesthetic contemplation of nature’s beauty and variety through art and imitation.

And Waterton certainly practiced what he preached. Waterton visited South America four times between 1812 and 1824 in order to study the flora and fauna which he chronicled in his highly popular Wanderings in South America published in 1828. He also established one of the first nature reserves on his estate, Walton Hall. He constructed an enormous wall around his lands to keep poachers out, built birds nests, frequently boasted he spent more time climbing trees to study birds than on the ground, and in the process developed his own distinct taxidermy procedure to establish himself as one of the preeminent taxidermists of the early nineteenth century, not to mention, becoming the most famous fraudulent taxidermist, perhaps of all time. As biographers and historians delight in noting, the aristocratic Victorian Yorkshireman was a kook, a verifiable eccentric, with more than one man's share of hangups and peculiarities.  

Although Waterton was one of the most skilful taxidermists of his age (his superb specimens of birds and animals have remained pristine to this day), his reputation as a serious naturalist has been tarnished by his disturbing ability to combine and mould parts of nature into hallucinations. His creatures were satirical monstrosities crafted from bits and pieces of animals: his aim was not to fool the viewer into believing they were observing a work of nature but rather to make present his opinion on institutional corruption and religious perversion (Waterton was a Catholic living in a predominately Protestant
Image taken from the Wakefield Museum's website at which
the Nondescript is still on display after nearly 200 years.  country). Among his fraudulent creatures is an orangutan adorned with donkey’s ears called “Martin Luther” and the more poetically titled “Noctifer, or the Spirit of the Dark Ages, unknown in England before the Reformation” was crafted from the head of an eagle owl, the legs of a bittern, and the wings of a partridge. Even more elaborate was his tableau labelled as “John Bull and the National Debt,” which included a porcupine with a human face and tortoise shell surrounded by menacing lizards and serpents. His most known creature, the Nondescript, was carefully crafted from the hinderparts of a monkey to represent a human face.  Read more about the Nondescript +

Interestingly, Wanderings, Waterton’s spirited travel diary, with the Nondescript as a frontspiece was published just eight years after Mary Shelley’s notorious literary hallucination, Frankenstein. The process of taxidermy always borders on resurrection by breathing life into corpses and endowing them with a quasi-immortality. It is hard not to compare Waterton’s taxidermy Dr. Frankenstein’s own creative process. Both had a comprehensive knowledge of nature. Both attempted to usurp her generative powers in order to create new creatures and new life.