Tim Bovard, the museum’s taxidermist, oversees the menagerie of mounted big cats and other wildlife that occupy its dioramas.
Tim Bovard, taxidermist at the National History Museum of Los Angeles, with two of his creations, a black jaguar and bat in his office at the History Museum Wednesday, October 18, 2023. Bovard is no stranger to black cats, bats and other creatures throughout the year, not just at Halloween. Like a swarm of bats or a thirsty vampire, Halloween is almost upon us, and mazes, monsters, hayrides, and spectacular light shows are all offering family fun across the Southland.
“When I was 3 years old, I took something to show my neighbor,” he remembers. “I didn’t know it, but it was a fully-grown, adult female black widow spider, and thank goodness, she was very calm, and took it gently from me.” There are mounted bats, big cats, spiders, beetles, cockroaches, and snakes, and plenty of big beasts with big teeth, including the Museum’s famous dinosaurs. Some specimens of those creepy crawlies are alive and kicking in the Nature Lab and Bugtopia too, though safely behind glass.
Back in his cramped workshop, it is hard to not to be wide-eyed at the dozens of animal plaster death masks on the walls. Earlier, when he saw a coiled rattlesnake he had mounted, he noted: “I need to polish those eyes,” and explained that on field trips he is not worried about rattlers “because I kept snakes in my bedroom when I was young: I was a herp guy.”
The chaotic workshop is strewn with random taxidermied animals, mainly birds of all colors and sizes, but there are also measurement blueprints, the pale-yellow forms that are sculpted to form the mannequin over which skins will be put, a wolf skin in a sealed plastic bag, and another Halloween horror for many: a white Pallid Bat with big ears, his wings spread wide.
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