Still Life

Kirk Strodel did not have time for a paper route when he was 11.

He was busy stuffing dead animals.

Pigeons, gophers, pheasants, baby chickens--he started out small, guided by a correspondence course. He’d seen an ad in Boys’ Life magazine for the Northwestern School of Taxidermy in Omaha and signed up. He was working his way up the food chain.

“When I was younger, I was into collecting bugs and things like that. It just kind of progressed into bigger things,” said Strodel, standing in the still-life zoo of his 15-year-old Costa Mesa taxidermy shop, Living Designs. It is one of four such businesses in Orange County. On a counter top behind him, a raccoon sits alertly on its hind legs, seemingly surveying the assorted ducks--frozen in flight--on the opposite wall.

The workshop, which he owns with his younger brother, Randy, is full of birds, fish, game animals and assorted beasts in various states of restoration. A male peacock in full display looks coyly over its wing at a workbench. Two large tunas hang on a nearby wall, not far from an earnest-looking prong-horn antelope.

Atop a metal bookshelf, full of assorted small creatures and their parts, sits a friendly-looking cockatiel, perched on a wooden mounting, patiently waiting for its owner.

“It was a lady’s pet she’d had for 13 years,” said Strodel, a 39-year-old Newport Beach resident. “She’s going to put it in a little glass dome and put it in her house somewhere.”

Sitting in a cardboard box in a corner of his shop, the brown, furry hide of an animal not immediately identifiable is rolled up and packed in salt.

“This man’s pet Rottweiler was really old and he had to be put to sleep. He wanted to remember him. We use the salt to dry the skin and then we’ll send the hide off to the tannery. When it comes back from the tannery, it will be nice and soft.”

When the bereaved pet owner or proud hunter wants the animal stuffed and mounted, Strodel stretches the skin over a foam molding, inserting wires in different parts of the anatomy to create a lifelike pose. A cheaper alternative for pet owners is to have their pet skinned and tanned, and leave it at that. It was the option chosen by the owner of the Rottweiler.

“He could hang it on a wall or lay it over the back of a couch, or he could use it as a throw rug, but it would get some wear that way. He was talking about making it into a vest for his son.”

Strodel looks back on the scores of exotic animals he’s skinned and stuffed, preserved and painted over the years, and traces his career back to a chance meeting with the taxidermist for the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History: George Adams. He was visiting the museum with his mother, a nurse, who told a receptionist about her son’s interest. The receptionist offered an introduction.

“He took us in the back where he was working on the Dall sheep scene. They were going to be in this big diorama, on a mountain slope. I started to pet one of them and he told me to watch out, because in those days they used to use arsenic.

“All those huge elephant scenes and stuff like that--he’s the one that did most all of those. It took him a year to mount that bull elephant. He actually went to different parts of the world and collected the animals himself.”

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The largest animal Strodel has mounted was a 1,300-pound buffalo for a rancher in Hawaii. The job took six months. The largest fish he’s done was a 1,200-pound black marlin. Only on rare occasions is the skin of the fish used. Typically, he makes a cast of the fish and creates a replica, painstakingly painting every tiny scale.

Those customers who hunt exotic game throughout the world ship the refrigerated bodies of the animals they kill to his Costa Mesa shop. His first task is the most distasteful part of the job: He defrosts and then skins the animal. From then on, Strodel concentrates on making a truly lifelike recreation. It is the art of his craft.

“When I mount a coyote head, for instance, I want to put snarls in it, so I raise the lips up and put little wrinkles above the nose. And the eyes, instead of being rounded, I put them in at more of an angle, to help give it more of a ferocious expression.

“On a deer, if I want to capture an alert look, I put the ears forward and have the eyes wide open, to give it an intense kind of look. Or I can do it with the ears more relaxed and the head turned a bit more, and it looks like he’s more tranquil. I can capture a lot of different expressions just by the way I place the eyes.”

Strodel sees himself as an artist, but none of his artwork is hanging in his home.

“I’m not a hunter; I don’t collect trophies; and I have small kids. My wife doesn’t really like this stuff that much, as far as me hanging things up in the house. I just keep everything here at the shop.”