Santa Cruz taxidermy lecture explores how preserving animals can inspire conservation

Master taxidermist Allis Markham says preparing an animal for taxidermy is a lot like peeling an orange. 

“It isn’t really gory. When an animal dies, all the blood rushes to the vital organs. There’s not a whole bunch of blood anywhere,” Markham said. “The juice isn’t everywhere when you peel an orange, is it?”

After two decades in the taxidermy industry, Markham has expanded her practice to conservation education, mainly mounting animals for museums and nature centers. Her goal, as she puts it, is to “turn a dead bird into a tool for creating empathy.”

Markham and her birds will grace the stage of The 418 Project on Thursday, when she will give an illustrated lecture on how taxidermy can be used for conservation education. 

Her lecture will follow the process of sourcing an animal, creating the mount and then using it as a tool for conservation education at a museum or nature center. She plans to bring examples of her work that people can touch. 

“People don’t understand what’s really underneath the skin,” she said. “I really want everyone to see the artistic aspect because that’s how we create that feeling of life.”

Markham said working so close to nature and death has opened her eyes to animals suffering at the hands of overconsumption and climate change.

“I look at single-use plastics so harshly because I’ve seen the result of plastic obstructing an animal’s throat,” Markham said. “If I can turn that death and that suffering into a way for people to change certain habits or change the way they vote, then I might not have been able to save this animal, but maybe I can save a different one.”

She hopes that creating more mounts for museums and nature centers will spark conversations about conservation and inspire visitors to look more closely at the natural world.

“To see the animals go to a nature center and know that kids will be looking at them and drawing pictures,” she said, “my hope is if I give people that preview, they’ll want to go outside and find that quiet moment where they don’t look at their phone and actually try to see the live ones with their own eyes.”

Markham’s own path to taxidermy started at a museum. She first fell in love with taxidermy at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County in the halls of mammals, gazing around in awe at the massive lions and elephants mounted around the room.

Now, she owns Prey Taxidermy in L.A., where she primarily preserves animals for museums and nature centers, along with a few individual commissions. All of Markham’s specimens are salvaged, meaning the animals were not killed to be mounted. Some come from aviaries, zoos or pest-control centers.

Her newest project is a galah cockatoo named Solomon, whose owners commissioned her to taxidermy him after he died. 

“On my list right now, I do have quite a few small birds to do. I’m just going to wear my headphones and listen to some audiobooks and just go through them. You get to start with this frozen dead bird and then you have this little alive-looking, colorful piece of art.”

After nearly 20 years in taxidermy, Markham has heard it all: “It’s pretty low-hanging fruit at this point to be like, ‘Oh, are you a murderer?’ It’s like, ‘Haha, Norman Bates.’”

“When you don’t have the same discomfort around death, it’s more comfortable for people to consider you strange than themselves strange,” she said.

Markham plans to lean into the “creepy” connotation of taxidermy for the lecture, but doesn’t feel as though her work actually warrants that impression.

“I don’t think there’s anything creepy about my well-lit studio where we’re all talking about evolutionary biology and a new episode of a podcast. It’s kind of sunny,” Markham said. “We’re not making something alive look dead, right? We’re making something dead look alive again.”

Markham said she’s excited to experience Santa Cruz County’s coastal forest in the fall and chat with people ahead of Halloween.

“If you open a taxidermy catalog or supply website, you could just figure out a whole Halloween costume from there,” she said. “They have fake eyes in every kind you’ve ever imagined, jaw sets, tongues. I’m going to bring up a whole bunch of stuff. I can’t imagine a better coffee-table book than just a taxidermy supply catalog.”

The appeal of taxidermy goes beyond its eerie aesthetic, though. Markham hopes that by bringing people closer to animals they might otherwise never encounter, her work can inspire them to protect the ones still living in the wild. 

“Inevitably everything dies. Life is very short,” she said. “It inspires me to keep doing what I love to do, and when I can’t do it anymore, maybe I can donate my body to science and end up like my specimens.”

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