Taxidermy- Wildlife Art

Richard Gensch

From a large garage outside of his Bonner home, situated eight miles east along Montana Highway 200, an inner tube’s toss from the recreational arcadia known as the Blackfoot River, Gensch, 42, applies decades of taxidermy experience to create and sculpt the most accurate game mounts and fish art. Like most professions, different taxidermists have distinct styles and work habits, and the key is in finding the right one to preserve your most memorable outdoor adventure. “If it looks alive, the taxidermist did a good job,” said Gensch. “The deer should look like it’s about to blink, the bird like it’s ready to fly, and the fish as if it could swim away.”

Recent technology has made such work much more realistic. Over the last few decades, taxidermy trailblazers have been creating anatomically precise manikins which incorporate every slight detail of the animal – right down to each muscle and tendon – in dramatic and striking positions. New mounting techniques allow animals to be portrayed with astonishing lifelike accuracy; in fact, today, certain taxidermists even specialize in recreating extinct animals. With mounts developed in realistic environments and poses appropriate for an individual species, modern taxidermy offers an extreme departure from the crass, snarling caricatures popularly submitted as hunting trophies years ago. Taxidermy’s greatest progressions can be spotted in these accurate new forms and the finely detailed foam manikins available, said Gensch. “Old mounts were crude and filled with paper Mache. Now these foam manikins are lightweight and virtually indestructible. They are pretty neat.”
Six deer heads hang on the walls of his shop, Buckhorn Taxidermy, waiting for their finishing touches – glass eyes and plastic jaw sets – which Gensch administers in meticulous fashion. Looming overhead, 10 sets of deer antlers are tagged and waiting to be rejoined with their heads. In the upstairs loft, there are dozens and dozens of hides. “The backlog makes the taxidermist,” said Gensch, who has built up a fairly solid clientele from all over the world and recently completed mounts of exotic baboons and warthogs. Since it takes the taxidermist ample time to salt, cape and ship an animal, it’s not uncommon for buyers to wait for more than one year for a taxidermist to finish a mount.

”Outdoorsmen should have a taxidermist picked out before they go hunting or fishing, in the event they get something they want to mount,” said Gensch. It’s also important for hunters to contact a taxidermist if they are uncertain about proper field handling or caping techniques. If possible, Gensch suggests buyers visit prospective taxidermists beforehand, and look closely at the way he or she sets the eyes on a mount – making certain they are symmetrical and not cross-eyed. He also recommends examining the ears to be certain they are not deteriorating, and antlers to make sure they are not uneven on the head. Most mistakes can be attributed to a lack of experience, said Gensch. Seems there’s an old adage in taxidermy realms: you don’t become an actual taxidermist until you’ve been working for ten years and have experienced all situations. “Plus, it’s a mistake for people to choose a taxidermist based only on pricing. If something is meant to last for a lifetime, quality of workmanship should be the first concern,” said Gensch.

Gensch does traditional skin mounting of fish, as well as produce fiberglass fish reproductions for even the biggest trophies, so whether you’ve reeled in a gigantic saltwater monster off the coast of South America or a freshwater beauty right here in the Three Rivers area, he can preserve the memory. Photographs of the fish, its environment, and anything pertinent to the desired finished mount are very important, making reproductions perfect for the angler who snags a 50-pound salmon on the first day of a long float trip. Gensch is available to insure that you get a mount looking exactly like what you photographed. “You don’t have to carry the fish with you the entire time because all I need is a picture and the length and girth measurements of the fish, and I can reproduce it perfectly down to the scale,” said Gensch, who appreciates the fact that such fish are still alive, waiting to be hauled out again.
The fish taxidermy art created by Gensch isn’t mass-produced (he finishes between 40 and 50 yearly), supplying further proof that all of his reproductions are individual works of art. Serious attention is paid to replicating the unique characteristics of each fish, and when it comes to identifying a great fish mount, he believes the confirmation is in the paint job, and that superior paint jobs come from experience.

For one particularly striking salmon reproduction, carved out of wood and granite, Gensch earned a blue ribbon in the Master’s Division of the 2005 World Taxidermy and Fish Carving Championships, held this past summer in Illinois. The show attracted competitors from 48 states and 14 nations, a testament to taxidermy’s newfound acceptance and recognition, stated Gensch. “These shows offer valuable educational and networking opportunities for all levels of taxidermy.”

Gensch feels that two determining traits of a good taxidermist are that they attend local, state or national conventions and subscribe to various trade magazines. “A taxidermist needs to keep up with the latest methods and technological advances in the industry,” he said. Furthermore, quality taxidermists should maintain a large reference library and have a staggering collection of reference photos and books on wildlife, said Gensch. The information available in a taxidermist’s reference library can make the difference between an unremarkable mount and an undeniable piece of wildlife art. Reference material can be outdoor magazine articles or books describing animal anatomy, biology and habitat. “For example, with birds you can do a lot more with their habitat, visual types-of-things, like create sea ducks swimming in a rippling pool of water, rocks and seaweed. You need to study their environment to complete such a piece,” said Gensch. Having three-dimensional pictures of the inner mouth, nostrils, eyes and ears of a live specimen is also advantageous. That’s because it’s important to know how a particular animal moves, so that it can be prepped, altered and fitted into the proper position without losing any of its reality. As one of an estimated 450 licensed taxidermists in Montana, and 75,000 in the country, Gensch believes that the standards, the expectations and the quality of work in his field are high in the Treasure State. “There are some top-notch taxidermists in Montana,” he said.

For as long as Gensch can recollect, he has prized and respected the outdoors, drawing it since childhood, and he feels that taxidermy is a reasonable extension of his unconfined love of natural landscapes, scenery and wildlife. Growing up a country kid in Wisconsin, down the road from a pretty and undisturbed lake, where he would catch, inspect and admire different forms of aquatic life, he saved up his newspaper route money to take fish taxidermy courses. Years later, as a teenager he worked at the taxidermy business of his dad’s friend throughout high school, and opened his own shop in Missoula in 1988, before moving Buckhorn Taxidermy to its current Blackfoot location two years ago.
Hunting and fishing were meaningful, symbolic parts of his childhood, a way of growing up, therefore, Gensch sees the animal mounts that he fashions and enhances as products that help others capture similar memories, and as a means of honoring the animal that’s been harvested. “Wildlife is held in such high regard in our society, and I simply put it on a pedestal for people. The trophy is always in the eyes of the beholder.”