Bog Myrtle & Peat

There’s mountains of taxidermy for sale in the junk shop at Wadebridge. Stuffed birds stand on every table and bookcase, and if you had to name a general trend of species there, you’d call them “moorland birds”. So there’s a display of golden plover, a box containing three ring ousels and a dunlin in a bell jar. They’re stacked like luggage on a railway platform, but there’s nowhere for these birds to go nowadays. Taxidermy is worse than passé, and many people find it creepy.

I’ve tried my hand at taxidermy and enjoyed it – and I do believe that it can be tasteful and interesting. But the process of preserving a bird rarely confers a lasting sense of immortality; it’s simply the process of decay spelled out in slow motion. It doesn’t matter how talented the craftsman was in reflecting the shape and poise of posture, the effect will inevitably fail. That’s where the creepiness comes in, and the effect at Wadebridge is heightened because these specimens have been in boxes for a century or more. Feathers were never meant to last more than a season, and every last one of these birds has been bleached by a hundred sunlit summers. Beneath the washed-out plumage, the skin has tightened itself into shortcuts across the bone. The curlew’s head has shrunk, and there’s a merlin with strange, demented glass where its eyes used to be. 

It’s reasonable to assume that the specimens in Wadebridge came down from Dartmoor before the Great War. That’s the nearest moorland source, but few (if any) of these birds can still be found there today. Curlews have failed, and many years have passed since merlins bred in the southwest. You could blame shooting and taxidermy for their loss, but it’s more realistic to say that their disappearance was driven by a number of complex factors. We’d love to blame a bad guy, but he rarely reveals himself. We can only be sure that abundance has become scarcity and the moors are poorer now. 

Back when these birds were caught or killed, they would have had something like a context to ground them. If they had been shot, the shooter would have been able to say where and why and how the shooting happened. But context fades as cleanly as colours do, and whatever these birds once meant has long since been forgotten. They’re just ugly things, and while the junk shop’s chairs and vases are intricately labelled with descriptions of style and provenance, the birds are reduced to single word descriptions, many of which are misleading or wrong. I found a teal and a coot, and both were called “duck”.

Perhaps these birds used to mean something to somebody, but I can’t help but judge them on what they’ve become. And if they’re saying anything at all, it’s a story of ourselves – and the fact that taxidermy used to be fashionable. Most surprising of all, some of these specimens commanded extraordinary prices. I thought of buying a short-eared owl for the sake of saving it, but the bird was attached to a tag for £150. I would have started at fifteen pounds and haggled down to eight – it was almost laughable to think of shelling out so much money for the almost-white skin of a bird which, for all its original thrill, might equally have been mistaken for a dove or a jackdaw.

Certain taxidermists from the “Golden Age” produced work which has now become prized and collectible, even when it looks scruffy to passers-by like me. But there was nothing special at all in Wadebridge, and that turned me against the whole idea. I was suddenly cross at the cost of these depressing objects so carelessly presented in tall and leaning heaps. If this is how you choose to remember these birds as they were, perhaps they’re better forgotten.