Check out the beautiful collection of vintage avian taxidermy at www.the-little-museum.com including a large number of Victorian hummingbirds. Gilles Grid purchased the birds - over 50 cases with 100 birds - from various auctions and e-bay.  Many of the birds were old and damaged, and Grid has restored many of them: removing dust, washing the birds with shampoo, remaking legs, feathers, and eyes.  The feathers were given back their luminous sheen with a capillary spray with oil of macadamia.

Morgan Mavis and a bear,

This might be just the solution to my recent comments on the plight of museum taxidermy.  If you're a museum thinking of overhauling your collection and getting rid of those nasty bits and pieces of animal lore, send them to Morgan Mavis and the Contemporary Zoological Conservatory.  Located in Toronto, Canada, the collection of vintage and contemporary taxidermy aspires to the giddy heights of Ark meets Cabinet of Wonders. 

"The CZC wants to create an Ark of visual delights and dizzying proportions, a space that makes you question why and how? A place that overwhelms, crowds, confronts fascinates and titillates a person's sense of wonder. We are not a natural history museum you will not find displays of wildlife in their natural habitat. We are documenting the wild collections and stories of Morgan Mavis. You will witness an overwhelming proportion of taxidermied species in her natural environment.”

read more here: http://thetaxidermyconservatory.com/index.php

The mix of taxidermy and history in Steve Plant's house in eastern France is among the most aesthetically fabulous compendia I've come across in some time.  The bust, the globes, the stuffed Crowned Crane; it is like stepping back into the days when dilettantes rambled the world in search of visual delights.  Plant's originality and humour recently caught the eye of wildly eccentric Lord Whimsy who maintains a website of pastoral dandyism (his phrase) appropriately titled The Affected Provincial's Almanack.  See more pictures and Whimsy's swooning analysis of Plant's house in Whimsy's journal.  A sampling of what you'll get from the Lord:

"Just look at the wonderful blue plaster against the brown shiny flounder floating over seashells of the most deliciously warm ivory, which create a swirling pattern when grouped together in a procession on the mantle. There's a sensibility at work, but nothing as heavy and methodical as a theory is ever imposed upon us visitors. This isn't calculated, but intuitive--and each tableau is a lovely little world of it's own. The house is full of such moments."

A bit raputuous but spot on.

Among the more strangely intriguing aspect of the zoology collections in the Natural History Museum at Tring (just 30 miles north-west of London) is the compactness of the displays. Compact may not be the right word. Perhaps biblical might serve, or better yet, arkish, if such a word existed. With their legs tucked beneath them to convenience being stacked vertically on shelves, the various species of zebras endure – immortal and serene – in the extraordinary glass-fronted ark created by Lionel Walter Rothschild, 2^nd Baron Rothschild.

Sitting on a stool not far from my desk, watching me as I write, is my stuffed fox named Rupert. With almost complete certainty, I can say that no fox has ever looked like Rupert before, and anyone who has seen Rupert would hope that no fox will ever again suffer the same indignities. Let’s start at the top. Rupert had been a Christmas gift the year before, purchased on e-bay for a grand total of 15 dollars. I’d called him Rupert to give some dignity to what was essentially a misshapen carcass: his face has the taut and brittle look of a mummy; his ears are bent and crooked, some teeth are missing, and his middle section likely intersected with an automobile tire since his head and arms emerge from the top of a hollow stump while his scrawny legs and tail stick out the bottom. He’s mounted on a ragged board about 3 feet long, which only adds to the cumbersome dimensions of Rupert and his stump girdle. There was nowhere to put him in my small apartment except alongside the sofa where he would suddenly – or so skittish visitors seemed to think – pop out from the shadows like an unhinged puppet in all his mangled glory.

At various times in our lives, we’ve all dealt with the material detritus of failed romances. Like the Coke bottles, the bits of Styrofoam and rope, the random shreds of clothing washed up the beach and left behind as the tide recedes – all coated in bubbly ocean scum – the objects that linger when love has passed always need some form of tidying and sorting. What to keep. What to give away or sell. What to set on fire, if that’s your style.

And so, when my relationship ended a few months ago, I found myself picking through the typical flotsam and jetsam of sweaters, photographs, Cds and socks, and also – and not so typically – Rupert.

Needless to say, I was never infatuated with Rupert while I was in the relationship, but what to do with him now? I can’t just hide him in a box of photographs or throw him away like a chipped vase or a pair of men’s briefs. But why not? In the first instance: because he’s too big, but why not just toss him, especially as he’s recently developed a greyish crystallised lump in his mouth that I’m too afraid to investigate.

But living with a stuffed fox tends to get you thinking: what is Rupert? Considering the skinning, tanning, sewing, and stuffing involved in both taxidermy and upholstery, my leather sofa and Rupert really aren’t all that different. But then, the sofa doesn’t have Rupert’s sad, sad face. And this, I think, is part of taxidermy’s queasy potency: unlike leather sofas and leather shoes and leather jackets, stuffed animals have faces. And those wizened little mugs are constant reminders – in a way no leather handbag could ever be – that they once belonged to a very alive, very sentient creature.

The woeful demise of the dodo is one of nature's most famous extinction stories. The dodo’s first contact with Europeans occurred in 1507 when a Dutch expedition headed by Admiral Jacob Cornelius van Neck landed on an island off the East coast of Africa, subsequently named Mauritius by the admiral. Sailors would take dinner breaks surrounding by lush tropical verdure and consume boiled dodo. Dodo flesh was clearly an acquired taste as the sailors named it 'valghvogel'- meaning disgusting bird.

Controversy surrounds the date of the dodo’s disappearance (some say the 1660s, some say three decades later), but the dodo had been extinct for at least half a century when Carl Linnaeus - the father of binomial naming and taxonomy - named the bird Didus ineptus . Linnaeus derived didus from the Dutch name for the bird - doodor - meaning sluggard and stupid, and ineptus needs no translation. The poor bird has subsequently been renamed Raphus Cuculatus .

Several stuffed dodo were known to exist in European collections. In 1599, Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II actually acquired a live dodo, probably the first seen in Europe. It died, however, shortly after reaching Rudolph’s menagerie of rare and curious beasts, and by 1609, it is recorded among the Emperor’s catalogue of preserved creatures.

But perhaps the most famous stuffed dodo was that belonging to seventeenth-century father and son gardeners and collectors both named John Tredescant. The Tresdescant's Ark - as it became known - was a veritable cabinet of wonders, bulging with the most superlative and spectacular creatures in existence.  The museum's catalogue published in 1651 lists a "Dodar, from the Island of Mauritius; it is not able to flie being so big" among the whole birds on display. 

The Ark was taken over by Elias Ashmole under rather suspicious circumstances.  Despite widow Tredescant's refusal to give Ashmole the collection, he did eventually acquire it after Mrs. Tredescant's body was found at the bottom of a lake. Ashmolean renamed the collection after himself and moved it to Oxford.

In 1755, the curator of the Ashmolean Museum purged the museum's mouldering contents and tossed them on a bonfire. Among the “useless” items was a stuffed dodo from the late sixteenth century, thought to be the last surviving taxidermied specimen in the world. Only the charred head and a foot were salvaged. 

The image of the charred dodo head is taken from the website of Oxford's Museum of Natural History. Read more (opens as a pdf): http://www.oum.ox.ac.uk/learning/pdfs/dodo.pdf

The Victorians were - quite literally and without the least exaggeration - absolutely besotted with hummingbirds.  Not only did the number of known species proliferate over the nineteenth century - from 18 in 1758 to over a hundred in 1829 - but each new discovery seemed to shimmer more brightly with all the colours of the rainbow or was even smaller or more perfectly formed than all that had been seen in England before.  "There is not, it may safely be asserted, in all the varied works of nature in her zoological productions," William Bullock wrote about hummingbirds in 1824, "any family that can bear a comparison, for singularity of form, splendour of colour, or number and variety of species, with this the smallest of the feathered creation."

A case of nineteenth-century hummingbirds in the Natural History Museum, London.

Hummingbirds were frequently arranged on branches and displayed in visually intoxicating hoards like the image above, believed to have been created by Bullock in the mid-nineteenth century.  As Judith Pascoe notes, the diminutive size of hummingbirds and their appeal as bijouterie "increased the enthusiasm for and the ease of creating these kinds of conglomerations."  Hoarding accentuated the shimmer and vibrancy of the plumage and created a sort visual ecstasy for those not lucky enough to see the birds alive in the indigenous habitats.

Like Bullock, John Gould was also impassioned with the tiny birds, which he described as a "family of living gems." During his life he had amassed a collection of 1,500 mounted birds and 3,800 unmounted specimens and his five-volume Monograph of the Trochilidae, or Family of the Humming-birds, which he began in 1849 is considered by many to be his greatest achievement.  "That our enthusiasm and excitement with regard to most things become lessened, if not deadened, by time, particularly when he have acquired what we vainly consider a complete knowledge of the subject, is, I fear, too often the case with most of us," Gould wrote, "not so, however, I believe, with those who take up the study of the family of Humming Birds. Certainly I can affirm that such is not the case with myself; for the pleasure which I experience on seeing a Humming Bird is as great at the present moment as when I first say one.  During the first 20 years of my acquaintance with these wonderful works of creation my thoughts were often directed to them in the day, and my night dreams have not unfrequently carried me to their native forests in the distant country of America.”

Photo: Anthony Cheung.

On the white floor of the gallery, a lioness is sleeping, her head resting on her crossed paws, her ears softly turned downwards. She is relaxed, at peace, without worry. But there is only half of her, the front half, beautifully taxidermied, which disappears into globules of gold arcing away from her middle section. The work is a collaborative creation by the Dutch artists Afke Golsteijn, Ruben Taneja and Floris Bakker and is evocatively entitled Ophelia after the tragic heroine of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

The presence of a real animal in a gallery space, especially half an animal, is disconcerting to say the least. If the lioness wasn’t so flawlessly taxidermied and so gently posed, and if she wasn’t accompanied by the lumps of gold, Ophelia would seem better assigned to “road kill” than “art.” But the visual appeal of the work lulls viewers, and the lioness’s almost-human pose almost allows us to imagine ourselves in her position. Hiding the seams hides the violence inherent in taxidermy.

Despite the rawness of the work, its meaning hardly seems confined to its materials. Lion: dun-coloured predatorial mammal native to the African savannahs and Indian forests. Gold: atomic number 79, soft, shiny, yellow, malleable, dissolved by mercury. Rather, Ophelia seems to exist somewhere between its concrete presence and its allegorical significance: t he lioness and the gold, the queen of beasts, the king of metals and money.

The work offers a vision of a world where fantasy and reality merge into infinite possibilities, uncertainty, and wonder. Is the lioness liquefying or coalescing? Has she fallen under some enchantment or is she dreaming herself into existence? Or is this an alchemical vision of matter being transformed into the highest and purest of elements, or a more sinister symbol of humans’ transformation of nature’s vitality into capital? Is this aesthetic hedonism or brutality? The work brings to mind Stephen Greenblatt’s description of wonder as “the power of the displayed object to stop the viewer in his or her tracks, to convey an arresting sense of uniqueness, to evoke an exalted attention.” A wonder isn’t a wonder until it completely bewilders our expectations. A wonder enthralls us with its strangeness. It’s magnetic, magically charismatic, and altogether spellbinding. Yet, while a wonder may transport us out of ourselves by evoking strange and unnatural imagining, a wonder always draws us back – binds us so to speak – to its very real, very concrete presence.

In writing about their work, the artists draw attention to the frailty of the line dividing observed reality and poetic imagination. Combining their talents with glass, metal, embroidery, and taxidermy, the artists decorate and adorn real animals, transfiguring them from regular creatures – rabbits, hedgehogs, swans, birds, mice – into the tragic heroes of contemporary fairy tales. “The basic idea is that various stuffed animals undergo a transformation. It is difficult not to think about death when looking at stuffed animals, but in this case, the morbid is transformed into something beautiful.” In one work the ears of a rabbit, its head mounted on a wall as a traditional hunting trophy, are embroidered with intricate looping flowers. In another, a small hedgehog has been soldered on the antique frame of a child’s wheeled toy. Sewing pins blend in with its own quills. The works oscillate between brutality and beauty, melancholy and wonder. Ultimately viewers are left to make meaning of the pieces from their own reservoir of images.