CAMBRIDGE, N.S. — Bruce Peterson was 12 years old when he first tried his hand at taxidermy.
“It started out as a hobby,” he said.
That was 51 years ago, when he and his brother were reading Field and Stream magazine and came across a story on taxidermy.
“We read up on it and what they were trying to sell for a course, and thought that would be quite interesting,” he said.
His brother-in-law took the youngsters to the Museum of Natural History in Halifax to see some examples of what taxidermy can do. “As soon as we entered the museum and were looking at all the animals, mounted and so lifelike, we thought that would be an awesome hobby to have, doing this art,” Peterson said.
They sent for a mail-order correspondence course from the Northwestern School of Taxidermy in Omaha, Neb.
“The first course they send you is doing birds,” he said. “We spent a Saturday inside working on a crow and it ended up taking the whole day. By the time we got it together we were pretty frustrated. It didn't look like too much, and then we discovered it wasn't until the next day or the day after when you start to tweak things to make it look right.”
From there they went on to more birds, and then they took a course on doing head and neck mounts of large game. Peterson has stuck with it ever since.
He doesn't have any exact numbers, but over the course of 50 years he estimates he has worked on well over 1,000 deer, which are the most common item he sees.
“It's only over the past few years that I've done more than 100 a year,” he said.
That corresponds to the time since he retired from his job at Michelin, turning his part-time hobby into his full-time work at Valley Taxidermy in Cambridge.
He's now doing work for third-generation hunters in some families.
But taxidermy isn't only done on animals that have been harvested by hunters. Sometimes people come in with birds or animals that have been struck by vehicles or otherwise died, including bobcats, owls, ducks and other birds.
“People who are interested in wildlife like to have things preserved,” he said. “The more natural you can make it, the better they like them.”
He said clients will come in “with almost anything.”
He is working now on two highland cattle.
“People who get those done are breeders or have had them before,' he said, He said many hunters who come in looking to have a deer mounted are doing so because there is some kind of story involved, perhaps an animal they had watched for a couple of years before harvest.
“They all use the meat, nothing goes to waste,” he said. “The antlers and head are something they cherish, they're cherishing that animal.
“To them it's like the Stanley Cup ... the bigger bucks don't live forever, when you have it mounted the memories last forever.” Taxidermy, as one might expect, takes a bit of a stomach.
“It's not for everyone,” Peterson said. “You have to be able to deal with body fluids and blood.” It takes about 10-12 hours of total work time to prepare a deer head and chest for mounting, but that is spread out over the different stages of preparing the hide. Peterson has 300 to 400 projects on the go in the run of a year.
He has done full mount of a moose, which was a 100-hour job. ”There was the skinning and fleshing ... that was a big project.”
The taxidermy industry isn't exactly flush with people in Nova Scotia right now, with just Peterson and a Hants County taxidermist working as far as he knows.
“A lot of the guys that were older than me with established businesses have passed away and no one has taken up their business,” he said. “There's the odd person that does a few things, but nobody to the extent that they could do something like a life-sized moose.”
He said that's likely a time issue.
“A lot of people think about wanting to learn to do taxidermy, but it's a lot of hard work,” he said. “To do things to the point you get really good at it takes years of experience and dedication.”
He said there are more taxidermists in New Brunswick than Nova Scotia, and quite a few in western Canada “I have basically dedicated my life to taxidermy, and I'll continue as long as I can breathe because I do love it,” Peterson said, “I love seeing the expression on people's faces when they come to pick up their animal and see how beautiful it is.”
