A Catamount Comes Out

Students Help with Restoration of Historic Taxidermy Collection

By JOSHUA BROWN
July 2, 2021

Sophie Feldman ’22 quietly, gently reaches out with a soft brush and dabs the tail feathers of a magnificent duck. It sits perfectly still. In fact, it’s been sitting still for decades, collecting dust in the lobby of Benedict Auditorium on campus—one member of a remarkable, but neglected, taxidermy collection of stuffed birds and other creatures that extends back to at least the 1850s. The specimens include an extinct passenger pigeon, a poached Canadian polar bear seized at U.S. Customs in the 1970s, and a deceased mountain lion held by UVM since the nineteenth century.

Now their dust is getting dusted off.

“This is a king eider,” Feldman says. “We’re working our way through this entire cabinet, cleaning all these birds.” Feldman is spending a good chunk of this summer vacuuming feathers, reglueing feet, organizing rare eggs, and examining mounts under an x-ray machine—to bring this display, and other parts of the UVM Natural History Museum’s collection, back into better form.

The taxidermy restoration project has been co-led by UVM staffer Sonia DeYoung, a 2017 graduate of UVM’s Field Naturalist Program, who “fell in love” with the collection, she says. Collaborating with professors Michael Sundue, Walter Poleman, David Barrington, Bill Kilpatrick and others, she successfully applied to the Institute of Museum and Library Services for a restoration grant. Under the careful hands of conservator Lisa Goldberg and Shelburne Museum expert Nancie Ravenel, the animals have been getting examined, catalogued, cleaned and fixed. “This is a complex and important collection,” Goldberg says, “we’d like it be around for hundreds of years to come.” Along the way, the professionals have been training Feldman and her co-intern Sabi Ward ’24, an art history and museum studies major.

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