Taxidermist's Trade Is Steeped in Family Hunting and Fishing Traditions
Randy Desormeau Sees Deer Mount Requests Decline With Animals' Size
By Amy Polk

Randall Desormeau shows how he airbrushes the colorful markings onto a brook trout mount to restore the natural look of the fish. Mr. Desormeau's painting studio is filled with hundreds of paint colors needed to recreate the multitude of hues found in nature. Mr. Desormeau makes mounts from the actual skin of fish, and also reproduces them from molds he made of real fish.

Almost everyone knows someone with a deer head on the wall.

They are kept as trophies by some and keepsakes by others. It is up to taxidermists to preserve the memory of hunting and fishing adventures.

"It's mostly about treasuring a memory," said taxidermist Randall Desormeau. "It's about capturing that animal in such a pose so it brings that feeling back from the time."

At his workshop and gallery, Northland Taxidermy, just north of Pickford, Mr. Desormeau is surrounded by such reminders. Brightly colored fish seem to swim around the walls of the main showroom, while in a room beside it, deer peer down from the wall. A raccoon appears to walk delicately through the woods, while a cougar slinks along another wall of the shop. Many of the mounts are placed in natural settings, against branches and leaves, and all are shaped in natural poses.

Randall Desormeau holds a mount from a buck that was about 3.5 years old. To the left is the fish mount display that won him the 1997 Master of Masters title. The display includes a mess of musky, pike, smallmouth and largemouth bass, rock bass, crappie, pumpkinseed, yellow perch, and walleye hanging on antlers nailed to a rustic door, while a tackle box sits nearby.

"When I go out into the woods, I'm looking at the creation, the beauty of the animals, and the way God created them," Mr. Desormeau said, explaining his devotion to recreating lifelike mounts.

He has paid close attention to animal habitat, and the place where animals are taken or caught. Growing up in the rural Eastern Upper Peninsula, Mr. Desormeau has hunted and fished his entire life. The nearby waters of the St. Marys River and Munuscong Bay are rich with ducks and fish, and the woods provide ample game opportunities. Mr. Desormeau comes from a line of hunters and anglers who supplemented their income by hunting, fishing, and trapping. His ancestors came to the area by water, traveling from Montreal, Canada, down the rivers, and up the Big Munuscong into the Pickford area.

Mr. Desormeau's great-grandfather, Cleophas Desormeaux, was a hunting and fishing guide for John Dodge, one of the Detroit Dodge brothers who founded the automobile company. The Dodge family had a hunting lodge on Munuscong Bay, and they traveled up the St. Marys River in a 40-foot yacht, taking a small boat to the mainland, Mr. Desormeau said. Their vast acreage was eventually donated to the State of Michigan, and became state forest, a campground, and a waterfowl preserve.

Mr. Desormeau learned hunting and fishing traditions from his father, grandfather, and greatgrandfather.

"We more or less lived off the land when I was growing up," he said.

Mr. Desormeau made his first mounts around age eight from a couple of crow's feet he attached to a board. He did the same with antlers. Like most young children, he collected tokens and trophies from his outdoor adventures, which instilled in him the notion of showcasing these items to preserve the memory. Many years later, he would mount a pike his grandson, Brenden, caught at age six while they were fishing together, and also a rock bass for his granddaughter, Zoe, when she was five. They were not the biggest fish, Mr. Desormeau said, "but they were nice ones."

"I wanted to mount them as a special memory, for us to look back on of my time with my grandson and granddaughter," he said.

Mr. Desormeau has been a professional taxidermist for 27 years, after working for 11 years as a contract painter. He painted on the Mackinac Bridge, among other large projects. Eventually there were fewer painting jobs, and Mr. Desormeau decided to change careers, turning to his experience with the outdoors and wildlife.

He took taxidermy correspondence courses, but was mostly selftaught. He earned two diplomas in the craft and became licensed; then, in 1986, he was the first person to earn an International Guild of Taxidermy Certificate for mounting fish, birds, mammals, and game heads. A year later, he won first place in the World Taxidermy Championship for a single, skinmounted fish, which earned him the title of Master World Class Fish Taxidermist. As a Master, he qualified to enter the Master of Masters competition in 1997 in Springfield, Illinois, where he won first place. The winning display of a mess of fish hanging on the back of a door is in his shop, and is one of his favorite works.

"I don't think it's too hard to be a taxidermist. There are no state regulations, so anyone can do it. So I would go to a lot of competitions to get better," Mr. Desormeau said.

The experience of entering his work in competitions was humbling and educational, he added.

"You put your heart and soul into something, and then you have someone sit there and tell you everything that's wrong with it," he said. "But I wanted to do better, so that's why I wanted to compete."

Producing a show-quality mount can take as many as 150 hours of labor. That does not include drying time between paintings and varnish applications. Ordinary mounts require as little as three hours to make, he said. Deer are the easiest to mount, and fish are the most difficult.

"You actually have to have artistic talent for [fish] because you have to put the color back into them," Mr. Desormeau said. "That's where my experience in painting comes in."

When he first opened a shop, his brother, Joe, and son, Brian, joined him in the business, which provided enough work for three people, until about 10 years ago. First Joe left, followed by Brian, who had worked with his father since he was 16, left the shop two years ago to move to Spokane, Washington, where he now works in construction.

"It's awful lonely now, working by myself after all those years with them," Mr. Desormeau said. "In the early 1990s, we mounted anywhere from 60 to 80 deer heads a year. Now I only mount about 17 to 20 heads a year."

He attributes the decline in deer mounting to the relatively young age of deer shot by hunters over the past decade. Younger deer are smaller and tend to have smaller antler racks. Around age 3.5 years is when they start filling out, he said.

"Usually a mountable deer is one that is a special memory or one that has a big rack," he said. "You just don't have the size of deer or the age you used to."

He believes most local deer are taken before they reach 3.5 years or older, many shot over a bait pile because they are too young and naive not to avoid bait. Smaller deer can also be attributed to more animals competing for the same amount of food and habitat, and Mr. Desormeau said he sees a lot more deer now than when he was growing up.

Mr. Desormeau still has plenty of work, with many of his jobs coming from outside the local area. Most of his fish mount orders come from Canada and lower Michigan, he said, and two weeks ago he mounted a 50-pound salmon that was shipped from Alaska by a St. Ignace angler. He also has mounted fish and animals for restaurants like Audie's in Mackinaw City, Raber Bay restaurant in Raber, and Antlers in Sault Ste. Marie. He mounted some of the animals featured in an extensive taxidermy collection at Les Cheneaux Community Schools in Cedarville, including an albino deer and a baby bear that had been hit by a car and recovered from a roadside. Some of his native fish and a deer head mount are displayed at the St. Ignace Welcome Center.

Taxidermists often use the craft to educate people about the natural world, and Mr. Desormeau is no exception. He has created several pieces featuring a double-crested cormorant sculpture gripping a yellow perch in its beak. One gazes out the front window of his shop, and he says it is a reminder of how the bird is destroying small fish populations. He also mounts sea lamprey, another devastating fish predator, for the Great Lakes Fishery Commission in Ann Arbor. The organization uses the mounts to educate the public and lawmakers.

Elsewhere in his shop, an otter lies on its back with its catch on its belly, showing the unique way the animal feeds. A clear display box gives a glimpse into the underwater world, showing a variety of ocean fish. Nearby, a cast of a hand holding a fish is inscribed with the quiet recommendation, "Catch and release."

Customer requests change all the time, he said, but lately a growing number of "catch and release" anglers have sought reproductions of the fish they catch. Mr. Desormeau can create a realistic sculpture from a photograph of the fish, measurements from the angler, and one of the 600 fish molds he has created from real fish.

"To me, I think it's a great idea if more people did it," he said, as these anglers release their catch to let them grow, reproduce, and give future anglers a chance to catch a big fish.

One thing Mr. Desormeau won't do is mount pets, although he gets about two requests a year to do so. Regardless of his talent and experience, he believes he cannot faithfully recreate a pet's expression.

What is Taxidermy?

• Taxidermy describes the many methods of reproducing a lifelike, three-dimensional representation of an animal for permanent display. In some cases, the actual skin, including the fur, feathers, or scales, of the specimen is preserved and mounted over an artificial skeleton. In other cases, the specimen is reproduced completely with man-made materials.

• The word "taxidermy" is derived from two ancient Greek words: "taxis," meaning movement, and "derma," meaning skin. Loosely translated, taxidermy means the movement of skin. The definition refers to the taxidermy procedures that involve removing the natural skin from the specimen, replacing this skin over an artificial body, and moving the skin around a form until it appears lifelike.

• Modern taxidermy is a newer art, only about 200 years old. While people have been preserving hides for thousands of years, the practice of stuffing animal hides for display trophies started around the 1800s. In the late 1800s and early 20th century, taxidermists like Carl E. Akeley, whom Mr. Desormeau calls "the grandfather of taxidermy" elevated taxidermy to an art. Mr. Akeley, who died in 1926 and was known for creating lifelike bodies around skeletal mounts, mounted Jumbo the elephant and created many of the mammal displays in the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. He also created what is considered the first habitat diorama for a science museum at Milwaukee Public Museum in 1899. Mr. Akeley was a selftaught taxidermist who learned the skill from a textbook.

• The modern practice of taxidermy incorporates many crafts, such as carpentry, woodworking, sewing, tanning, molding, and casting. It also requires artistic talent, and taxidermists are often skilled in sculpture, painting, and drawing. In a deer head mount, for example, the only natural parts of the animal used are the antlers and the skin. For animal mounts, taxidermists purchase foam mannequins, which are crude forms on which the animal's skin will be attached. The original animal's measurements are taken to determine what size mannequin to use, then the actual skin of the animal will be replaced on top of the mannequin. The animal skin will be tanned (a method of preserving animal hide) by the taxidermist or sent to a tannery. Taxidermists wet the skin and stretch it to make it fit around the mold.

• All of the other organs and tissues are re-created with man-made materials such as foam. The eyes are made from glass, the eyelids are sculpted from clay, the soft tissues of the nose and mouth are sculpted in epoxy or wax. The form of each animal, including the anatomy of muscles and veins, is recreated with polyurethane foam.

• There are many different methods for producing mounts (or recreations) of different species. Today, some taxidermy mounts, most notably saltwater fish, do not contain any parts of the animal at all. They are completely re-created from man-made materials. This practice is ideal for catch-andrelease anglers, who can release their game fish unharmed, and can still have a life-sized trophy produced from a good color photograph and measurements.

• Works of taxidermy are displayed in museums, colleges, businesses, restaurants, homes, and even local schools.