THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 13, 1994 TAG: 9411100199
SECTION: CAROLINA COAST PAGE: 14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Cover Story
SOURCE: BY LANE DEGREGORY, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: COLERAIN LENGTH: Long : 212 lines
AT THE AGE of 48, Jim Edwards still loves stuffed animals.
In fact, he stuffs most of them himself.
His 3,000-square-foot shop on Main Street in this tiny village is filled with giraffes, leopards and lions.
An ebony buffalo head stares wildly from a wooden plaque. A speckled bobcat lounges on a log. An African antelope bends its spiraled horns to drink from a mirrored pond in the front lobby.
And dozens of hides wait to be re-created into the exotic animals they once were.
Under Edwards' expert hand, the creatures can again come to life.
``I try to create more than just a mount. I like to give them a natural pose, so they don't just look like a dead animal sitting there,'' says Edwards, who has been a full-time taxidermist for 22 years.
Last year, Edwards won the Safari Club International's first-place award for a life-sized leopard mount. An elk he stuffed stands in the Princess Anne Marine Sports store in Virginia Beach. A brown bear he mounted is in an Alaskan museum. A Chicago museum features his black jaguar, tiger and a polar bear.
There are about 25,000 taxidermists in the United States, Edwards says. Only 2,000 stuff big game animals. Edwards used to have a full-time partner. Now, he primarily works alone. Sometimes, his 17-year-old son helps after school.
``My customers can pick the poses their animals were in when they were shot. Or I choose them from magazine photos. My molds are modeled from real animals' skeletal systems,'' Edwards says. ``They're not artists' conceptions of something. They're real proportions. These are the real things.''
With the exception of glassy eyes and sometimes truncated torsos, Edwards' animals look as alive as any in the zoos.
Difference is, these buffalo won't mind if you put your nose up against theirs to feel the bumpy, black nostrils. Lions let you stroke their thick, silky manes.
Many of Edwards' art works are entire animals, mounted as they would look in life. Others are mere heads on plaques. Giraffes have to be sawed off at the neck just to fit indoors.
Over the years, Edwards has stuffed hippos, porcupines, warthogs, baboons, crocodiles - even a black rhinoceros.
``These guys will last forever if they're inside climate controlled situations,'' says Edwards, adjusting a leopard's lips around its fiberglass face. ``I love wildlife. I enjoy working with each individual animal. I like the size, the power, the role each beast plays in nature.
``I'm fortunate enough to be able to live doing the job that I love.''
A graduate of N.C. State's Forestry and Wildlife Management program, Edwards has been hunting since he was a boy. At 15, he shot a beautiful white tailed deer. He couldn't afford to have his prize mounted. So his high school principal helped.
``We stuffed it together,'' Edwards says, smiling at the recollection of his first job. ``He taught me everything he knew.''
In 1973, Edwards began stuffing animals for friends in his mother's garage. Soon, he quit his job as a timber buyer. Then a friend offered him office space in Colerain - rent free.
The taxidermist moved to this community of 340 in Bertie County and opened shop alongside a lunchroom, bank and the telephone company. Most of the brick storefronts have long been empty. But the enormous plastic rhinoceros above ``Western Taxidermy's'' front door still stands proud.
Inside, the store and workshop open onto another world.
``I can do this work anywhere. Most of my clients don't care where I am. And the overhead costs here are really low,'' says Edwards, who gets most of his goods by motor freight and air delivery. ``I usually receive just the skin. The animal already has been salt dried. I just mold the hides.''
Like most taxidermists, Edwards began with deer, ducks and fish. He still enjoys walk-in orders from neighbors and friends. But his main market is now much more exotic.
Most of Edwards' animals come from safaris. Big game trophy hunters pay $3,000 and much more to travel by jeep into the heartlands of Africa - sometimes for weeks at a time. There, native guides show the primarily older men where the coveted animals roam. The parties use large bore rifles to bag their prey. Local villagers consume the meat.
``They boil the skulls, wrap them in burlap, and bury them for a while. Then, they remove the skins - trying to keep them in one piece. When I get them, I just re-wet them,'' Edwards says, unpacking a dripping giraffe hide from his back room refrigerator. ``They move like soggy tissues and are much easier to work with that way.''
Because he primarily uses already cleaned hides, Edwards' workshop is not besmirched by blood or entrails. The newly killed black bear which his son picked up from Norfolk International Airport that morning still smells a little gamey through its plastic wrap. But most of the animals are odor free.
Once the hides are pliable, Edwards begins arranging them around yellowish polyurethane foam and fiberglass molds. He used to make all the molds himself. Now, he buys pre-constructed forms and shapes them individually for each mount. The animals can strike poses from relaxed to about-to-pounce. Then, Edwards begins with the skins.
``You have to shave around the eyelids and nostrils, thin out the lips and repair any bullet holes or cuts,'' says the brawny taxidermist. ``Hide paste helps hold the skin on the mold. Then, you have to let it dry for a week or more.''
Much of the work is done with small knives and hand tools. But elephants' hides are so thick that Edwards' son, Will, says he has to use a powered reciprocating saw to slice through the quarter-inch skin. The high school senior helps his dad make hassocks from the elephants' huge feet, fashion rugs from zebra pelts and creates many of the wooden mount bases himself.
``We use molding clay around the nose, eyes and cheekbones to build the facial structure back up,'' says Will Edwards, who enjoys surfing safaris more than big game hunts. ``Then we paint back on the nose, tear ducts and other details with acrylics. The eyes, teeth and tongues are plastic.''
Primarily self-taught, Jim Edwards says it has taken him years to learn some tricks of the trade. Furniture polish is useful for touching up buffalo horns and hides. Modge-podge craft glaze recreates bumps for the nose. And by rotating the glass eyes, Edwards has discovered how to make the animals appear they are looking right at you.
``I go to zoos, sometimes, to watch the animals. But zoo animals don't really act or move like those in the wild,'' the taxidermist says. ``I try to get expressions with the eyes that look really life-like. You can open or close the mouths and eyes as much as you want. I even add the third eyelid with a paint brush so up close, you can barely tell it's not real.
``Cats and bears are my favorites to work with,'' says Edwards. ``On those species, you can get the best expressions with the eyes. I could mount that buffalo and it would look really real. But its mother wouldn't recognize it if its facial expression was off.''
A former safari guide, Edwards has been to Africa 18 times and to Mexico, South America, and around most of the United States. He has mounted all 27 North American big game species and most of those legal to hunt in Africa - more than 100 types of trophies in all. He has killed elephants, buffalo and giraffe himself.
``We try to shoot older males, ones that already are outside the reproductive line,'' says Edwards. ``Sometimes, you make a mistake. Then, you wish you could take that bullet out and let the animal live again.''
Edwards admits that with special interest groups and animal rights advocates becoming more vocal, big game taxidermy might not have long to live as a profession. He is encouraging Will to find a different line of work. But he defends the hunters - and the job - just the same.
``When I was a teenager, the kill was everything. Now, that's the least important part to me,'' Edwards says. ``In nature, you escape the rigors of daily life. I enjoy the challenge of the hunt and the power of the animals. I bet I'm the only man in Colerain who's watched a wildebeest birth. I really like seeing a pile of skin come to look like an animal again. And I appreciate what wildlife management programs can do for certain species.
``Some of these guys spend $50,000 on a three-week safari in Africa alone,'' says the taxidermist, whose shop is filled with foreign carvings. ``You need $1,000-a-day licenses just to look for lions. All that money goes back to the government. One hunter brings more revenue to those countries than 100 tourists. The funds are used to maintain and expand habitats, some of it goes to conservation of the species, and the guides, of course, get some.
``Without safari hunters and the revenues they bring,'' Edwards says, ``poachers would have long since eliminated some of these species.''
Although he still shoots some himself, Edwards only stuffs animals on commission. He'll mount almost anything. But customers must supply the skins. It takes about five months for the hides to be shipped from Africa to North Carolina. Edwards can finish a mount within four months. Usually, he works on eight to 30 animals per month. One safari, he said, equals an entire year's work.
Most people want the entire animal - or at least its head - stuffed, Edwards says. But over the years, he has had some unusual requests. In addition to the elephant foot stools and myriad of hide rugs he's created, the taxidermist has made lamps out of zebra feet, tobacco pouches from buffalos' scrotums, even a walking stick from the penis of a huge, African water buffalo.
``I think that's ridiculous. But it's what they wanted,'' Edwards says. ``I never get grossed out by it, though. Changing a baby's diaper disgusts me. But this is my art.''
Because the taxidermist's work is so specialized, prices vary. Deer mounts cost about $300 each. Giraffes cost $2,500. The most expensive animal to stuff is a life-sized elephant: $80,000.
One of Edwards' best clients is John Glover. In a sprawling home in Seaboard - near the Virginia border - Glover has a world record 10-foot-tall Russian brown bear, a 1,600-pound moose, the 251st biggest Alaskan caribou ever shot, and scores of other mounted beasts.
A North American cougar lies above the timbers in Glover's massive trophy show room. A Duiker - a tiny African antelope - is flopped over a tree next to a lounging leopard. A hartebeest from Tanzania - its burnt sienna coat soft and supple - gracefully arches its twisted horns toward the vaulted ceiling. A hyena appears about to attack a lion. And a wildebeest rug with curly black mane offers soft steps across the glossy hardwood floors.
``See the folds on his neck?'' asked Glover, indicating a large impala gazing into the massive stone fireplace. ``That's good work. Jim Edwards really captures the animal as it lived instead of just sticking a hide over a form.
``That's really how he looked when I shot him,'' Glover said of the impala. ``Jim has tremendous talent. He's hunted these animals in the wild and seen them alive. He knows what they do.
``I couldn't get anyone in the world to do what Jim does,'' Glover said of his favorite taxidermist. ``The quality of work - no, the quality of his art - exceeds almost everyone else's.'' MEMO: VISITORS WELCOME
Jim Edwards' ``Western Taxidermy'' shop on Main Street, Colerain,
N.C., is open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays through Fridays.
He welcomes walk-in customers and visitors who just want to see his
mounted safari. School groups, he says, are invited for free by
appointment. And he would like to begin some ``sensory safaris'' to
allow visually impaired people to feel the wild animals.
For more information, call (919) 356-2109.
ILLUSTRATION: Cover color photograph by Drew C. Wilson.
Stuffed animals seem to come alive under the careful craftsmanship
of Jim Edwards, a renown taxidermist living in Colerain. Hunters
around the world seek him out to stuff their big game trophies in
authentic poses.
Staff photos by DREW C. WILSON
Jim Edwards, right, chats with John Glover of Seaboard, whose home
is stuffed with mounts Edwards has done. ``The quality of work - no,
the quality of his art - exceeds almost everyone else's,'' Glover
says of Edwards.
Taxidermist Jim Edwards looks over a mounted whitetail deer head.
by CNB