Colorized

Born To Live Taxidermy

The father of modern taxidermy, Carl Akeley, was what you'd call a real "man's man." He's aged whiskey in an oak barrel that's been anthropomorphized into a human being. But you already knew that from looking at him. This colorized photo of Akeley standing next to his fresh kill shows just how tough he really was.

It's one thing for a hunter to take out his prey with a gun or even a bow and arrow, but it's an entirely different ballgame to take a wild animal's life with your bare hands. Akeley didn't just leave his trophies to rot, he practiced taxidermy in an era when you actually had to go out and do the dirty work yourself if you wanted something for your display case.

Akeley was a little bit Ted Nugent, a little bit Paul McCartney, and a little bit vaudeville, but he was all-around a unique specimen.

source: ryan urban

Born on May 19, 1864, near Clarendon, New York, the young Carl Akeley was pushed towards the farming life, but that's not how he saw his life taking shape. Akeley was fascinated with taxidermy from a young age after he was taken to an exhibit in Rochester with 50 variations of animals on display, all brought to life through the art of stuffing and mounting.

Akeley took his first stab at taxidermy when he was only 12 years old after a friend's canary died. Akeley stuffed the bird and sewed glass beads where its eyes would go in order to "fix" the animal. These two simple experiences led Akeley to his destiny. Over the next six years his obsession with taxidermy took over and studied as much of the art as he could before setting off to find work in his chosen field.

At 19, Akeley took an apprenticeship at Ward's Natural Science Establishment in Rochester before bouncing around the museums of New York. His co-workers found him overly ambitious, which didn't do him any favors, but after stuffing P.T. Barnum's beloved elephant Jumbo, Akeley was able to write his own ticket.

Hand to paw combat

source: Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago

In his lifetime, Akeley made five trips to Africa where he studied the animals of the plains and brought specimens back to the States. It was on his first trip to Somaliland in 1896 where he encountered the leopard in the photo in question. While on an expedition funded by the Field Museum of Chicago, Akeley and his buddies decided to hunt ostrich at dusk. After firing into the grass they heard a shrieking sound that they believed to be a warthog.

Not so, the sound proved to be that of a leopard who pounced on Akeley and tried to rip him limb from limb. Akeley and the animal fought to the death with Akeley barely coming out on top. Akeley wrote of the encounter:

I couldn't do it except little by little. When I got grip enough on her throat to loosen her hold just a little she would catch my arm again an inch or two lower down. In this way I drew the full length of the arm through her mouth inch by inch... [There was] only of the sound of the crushing of tense muscles and the choking, snarling grunts of the beast... I felt her relax, a sort of letting go, although she was still struggling. At the same time I felt myself weakening similarly, and then it became a question as to which would give up first.

Akeley saw taxidermy as an art form

source: american museum of natural history

Akeley wasn't just killing animals to kill animals, he believed in the vast importance of showing people in America what wild animals really looked like on the plains. Rather than hide his methods, he shared them with museums in hopes of having the animal skins placed on a perfectly molded recreation of of the animal's body, thus melding the artificial and the real to make something educational. His biggest goal was to build a large scale diorama of Africa with the game that could be found on the plains.

Biographer Jay Kirk told NPR about the state of taxidermy in Akeley's era, and exactly why he wanted to create a specific way to perform the job:

The skins of the animals were just kind of crudely stuffed with sawdust or rags, or whatever happened to be around... He wanted to resurrect these animals with a greater felicity of what the animal might look like in real life.

Akeley became a conservationist and an inventor at the end of his life

source: reddit

Akeley didn't spend his entire life as an arch taxidermist, cutting down animals until the day he died. In 1921, he was studying gorillas in the Congo and questioned just what it was he was doing and whether he could provide the same kind of educational information without ending the lives of the animals that he loved. Inspired by the gorillas of the Congo, Akeley petitioned the Belgian government to create a wildlife establishment for the gorillas and finally succeeded in his efforts in 1925.

At the same time, Akeley was inventing tools to make taxidermy easier for people who followed in his footsteps. He's responsible for the Akeley cement gun, a tool used to mount animals. An even more impressive invention was the Akeley camera or "Pancake camera" that could be easily mounted and was easy to rotate and to reload. Invented specifically for filming animals in the wild it went on to be used by the military during World War I for filming aerial reconnaissance.

He died in the field

source: wikimedia commons

Long after he fought a leopard to the death, Akeley passed away of a fever in the Congo in 1926. He was only miles from where he saw his first gorilla, and had his remains left in the country at what is now Virunga National Park, a sanctuary that he helped establish.

His memory was carried on by his second wife, Mary Lee Jobe Akeley, who was named as his successor as adviser to the American Museum of Natural History. Shortly after Akeley's death the American Museum of Natural History named their collection of ephemera from Africa the Akeley African Hall. More than just a guy who fought a leopard to the death, Carl Akeley was a conservationist who wanted everyone to love animals and the plains of Africa as much as he did.

1896, A Man (Carl Akeley) Posing with a Leopard He Killed with His Bare Hands (Colorized)

Born To Live Taxidermy

Hand to paw combat

Akeley saw taxidermy as an art form

Akeley became a conservationist and an inventor at the end of his life

He died in the field