Thought taxidermy was a dying art? This duo is coming to Bellingham to prove you wrong

Disney has created some of the most recognizable movies, shows and characters of the last century. Apparently, it also created one of the world’s best taxidermists.

“I used to work at Disney on the marketing side, and they drove me so crazy that I decided to taxidermy my woodland friends,” Allis Markham said from her Los Angeles workshop on a video call with The Bellingham Herald.

“Well, I guess that’s the funny version of it. But the reality is I got disillusioned, and I really missed working with my hands.”

Markham, who has earned honors at the World Taxidermy and Fish Carving Championships, will be in Bellingham next weekend for a pair of events at the Whatcom Museum.

First, on Friday, May 31, she’ll lead a screening of “Stuffed,” a documentary about a younger generation of taxidermists changing the art. Then, the following day, she and her second-in-command, Paloma Strong, will lead a two-and-a-half-hour introductory taxidermy lab, also at the museum.

“The event itself is going to be very unique, because it’s not us just talking about what we do and, and doing like, ‘Oh, this is what we would be doing,’” Markham said. “No, we’re actually going to be there doing the different stages of bird taxidermy.”

When she left Disney, Markham, who had always been interested in animals and biology, knew she wanted to go into the educational side of taxidermy. But she couldn’t figure out how to get in touch with the taxidermist at Los Angeles’ Natural History Museum.

“So I stalked the taxidermist there, Tim Bovard,” Markham said. “[His email address] was nowhere. But I figured out the convention of how they put things on their company emails and emailed him.”

Bovard replied, and eventually Markham quit her job at Disney to work for him before starting her own business, Prey Taxidermy, in 2011.

Strong came on board a few years later, when she was just 16. But Strong said she’s known she wanted to be a taxidermist since age 12, when she visited the Natural History Museum just after moving to L.A.

“That’s when I realized, oh, this isn’t a dead art; there are still people doing this. And I want that job,” Strong said.

Strong quickly realized that she didn’t want to learn under just any taxidermist — she wanted to learn under Markham.

“I, at my middle school, go on their library computer, and I Google taxidermy near me and find Allis. And I realized everything in my life is now changed,” Strong said. “My goal in life is to work for Allis Markham and work at Prey Taxidermy, because there’s not a lot of women who are in the field.”

So Strong began plotting how she would meet her eventual mentor. She’d draft emails or type Prey’s number into her phone, only to back out at the last second.

“I told everyone around me, ‘I’m gonna be a taxidermist. I’m gonna work for this woman,’” Strong said. “She doesn’t know yet, but I’m gonna change her life.”

Then, just before her 17th birthday, Strong got a gift — a pass to a Birds 101 class at Prey.

“I spent a whole month picking out my outfit, making sure I looked cute and working up the courage on the first day to ask Alice if I could intern for her,” Strong said. “And then she asked me to intern for her.”

“I had a vibe. I don’t know what it was,” Markham said. “I thought she was older than she was. And then I was mortified.”

Strong came on as an intern, before Markham let go of her assistant at the time to make room to promote Strong.

“If an 18 year old takes your job, it was never really yours to begin with,” Markham said.

Over the past decade of working together, their partnership has grown to the point that Strong can anticipate Markham’s next move.

“I can just go like this,” Markham said while reaching out out her arm, “and she knows what to hand me.”

Their Bellingham workshop will cover the basics of bird taxidermy, from skinning to posing and mounting. The duo focuses on preservation and education, primarily working on salvaged specimens, such as birds that died after crashing into a window or in a pet store.

“There are many taxidermy courses out there. And I think a lot of them are more focused on oddities, or taxidermy as a craft, rather than taxidermy as a tool for education, conservation,” Markham said. “We put anatomy first.”

The event was originally the idea of a Whatcom Museum staff member who had taken classes at Prey in the past. But Strong, who spent her early years in Redmond, Wash., thought it would be a great opportunity to show Markham around the Pacific Northwest.

“She has been a student of ours for about a year or two,” Strong said. “She’s taken a few classes. And she sent me an email out of the blue: ‘Hey, I just moved to Bellingham,’ and I love that area of Washington. … And so when she said, ‘I work at the Whatcom Museum, we’d love to have you,’ we jumped at the opportunity.”

The classes typically draw “everybody from museum professionals, all the way to somebody who just wants to make some birds for a Christmas gift,” according to Markham. That’s all part of Markham’s goal of making taxidermy more accessible to everyone.

“We also try to make taxidermy very approachable. It’s important to us to be the taxidermy studio that feels safe for diversity and inclusion, especially for women and theys in the space who maybe don’t think of themselves in the space a lot,” Markham said.

The movie screening, followed by a question-and-answer session with Markham, will run from 6:30 to 9 p.m. Tickets cost $35 for museum members and $45 for non-members.

The workshop will take place the following day from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Tickets are $120 for members and $135 for non-members.