Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Laurel Bohart has volunteered her time to mount or prepare the study skins of 100 birds, fish and mammals for the Cortes Island Museum. She is a member of the Board and one of the co-curators of Wild Cortes in the Linnaea Farm Education Centre. Bohart is also a professional taxidermist, whose interest can be traced back to her parent’s missionary years in Nigeria during the mid 1960s.
The first words she used to describe taxidermy were, “It's fun.”
To which she added, “It's a form of sculpture when you mount a bird or a mammal. It's better than a photograph, which is two dimensional. These are three dimensional.”
“The first bird I did was a hawk which is like a Cooper's Hawk, only smaller. I didn't know you had to skin the legs, the head, the tail, and the wings. So of course it became smelly and got thrown out. That was my first attempt. Later on I learned to skin them and pin them out and let them dry.”
“We came back to Canada in 1967, and my grandfather showed me how to skin birds and sent me back with eyes and material and wire and a lot of the things I needed plus a book to learn from. So I learned from the same book he did from the early 1900s when he was a boy.”
“My father was killed in 1970, and in 1971 our family came back to Canada permanently. That's when I was able to learn more from my grandfather and mounted my first deer head. I think I helped him do a rug or something like that. I learned on the job and bought books that he recommended. I talked to other taxidermists, did a lot of study and practical application on my own.”
“When I got better at it, I was able to start a business, ‘L and M Taxidermy Service’ in Duncan in 1984. I had graduated from university by then. I had my master's in Museum Science and Ornithology, which is bird studies, but couldn't find a job in the local area. I was tired of traveling. I wasn't going to go back east and I had just come back from Kentucky because I had finished my Master's Degree down there. I didn't want to go anywhere. I wanted to do what my grandfather did.”
In the podcast Laurel Bohart talks about taxidermy, her life, coming to Cortes and a few of the species she has mounted at Wild Cortes.
