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Local taxidermist wins third place in worldwide contest for re-creation of Bald Eagle

T-R PHOTO BY ROBERT MAHARRY — Chris Clough of rural Marshalltown was recently recognized with a third place award in the interpretive division at the 2024 World Taxidermy Championship for his re-creation of a Bald Eagle using feathers from Cornish hens, Canada geese and a domestic white turkey.

Chris Clough, a native of Burlington, moved to the Marshalltown area in 1978 to become an art teacher at East Marshall. When that didn’t work out, he took a job at Lennox and spent 36 years there, but his true passion has always been taxidermy and his business, Wildlife Creations. In the past, Clough has entered his work in state contests, but after it was announced that the World Taxidermy Championships would be held in Coralville this year, he decided he was ready to compete on the international stage.

The painstaking efforts he put into re-creating a Bald Eagle — of course, he didn’t stuff a real one because doing so in the United States, where it is the national bird, is highly illegal — paid off as Clough received third place in the interpretive division for his work, which shows the “Bald Eagle” standing on an old gun and a rock over a whiskey barrel.

During a recent interview, Clough explained how he went about putting the re-creation together and credited Jim Day for doing the first re-created Bald Eagle back in 1990.

“It’s probably the most difficult and challenging area of taxidermy because you have absolutely nothing to start out with,” Clough said. “In order to create this eagle, there’s four Cornish hens, four Canada geese and one domestic white turkey. So (it’s) a lot of birds to make one bird. There’s probably over 5,000 feathers cut, airbrushed and glued overlapping each other, and there’s different layers of feathers to get that fullness.”

The beak, he added, is made of an epoxy skull, and he used over 100 reference pictures to create the finished product.

“Everything has to be the right size, the right proportion, and you have to have a knowledge of anatomy (and) how a bird is put together. So you have to be a sculptor in order to be a re-creation taxidermist,” Clough said.

Because he competed in the interpretive division, Clough also worked to incorporate “abstract elements” into the project, and as he dove deeper into them, he also contemplated the long-lingering question of whether or not taxidermy should be considered art.

“It is when you do something special with it. If it’s just a deer on the wall, not so much, but when you do something special, it becomes art,” he said.

Citing frustrations with other venues, the organizers behind the World Taxidermy Show, which rotates between the U.S. and Europe each year, hosted it in Iowa for the first time ever back in August. There were over 900 entries in 2024, an all-time record.

In all, Clough estimates that he put over 600 hours of work into the re-creation, but about six weeks before the show, he came close to giving up on it. His daughter Sharice, who lives in the Netherlands, was preparing to come back to the U.S. for the world show when he told her the disappointing news.

“I told her, I said ‘I’m just not gonna make the date.’ I can’t do it. My shop is putting a lot of demands on me and the fish are biting. I gotta go fishing. It just looked like it wasn’t gonna happen for me,” he said. “She was very upset with me and wouldn’t take no for an answer, and so I said ‘OK, OK, I’m gonna do it.’ She said ‘I’m not coming home unless you go to the world show,’ so she forced my hand on it.”

In order to fulfill his end of the bargain, Clough closed down Wildlife Creations temporarily and worked 16-hour days entirely focused on completing the re-creation. There was still wet paint on it two hours before he left his headquarters on Vine Avenue for the show, but he got it done in the nick of time.

He was shocked by the number of taxidermists from around the world who had made their way to the Hyatt in Coralville as it took five hours just to get registered. He enjoyed his week there — he drove back and forth each day to save money on a hotel — and one day, he received a call from an unfamiliar area code.

It was Dave Luke, who Clough considers one of the “iconic pioneers of taxidermy,” asking for more information about the piece and describing the powerful impact it had made on him. Initially, Clough said he wanted it to remain open to interpretation, but he eventually explained that it was a “right wing conservative” piece about the importance of protecting the Second Amendment.

“The eagle is standing on a rusty old gun. He’s been standing on it for a long time protecting our Second Amendment. The gun is resting on a rock that has the stripes of our flag, the red and white. If you look at the rock, it’s cracking, it’s breaking apart,” he said. “There’s the eye of the eagle directly below the gun, and it’s kind of cracking around it. But it’s trying to be vigilant. It’s trying to make sure that that Second Amendment is not being infringed upon. The waterfall, the eagle is bleeding red, white and blue, kind of faint, but it’s going into the whiskey barrel. He’s not only protecting our Second Amendment, but he’s also protecting our 21st Amendment, which did away with prohibition.”

The well-known phrase “We the People” is inscribed on the barrel, a reminder, Clough said, of the freedoms Americans enjoy regardless of which political party they belong to. And Clough, who has won numerous state awards in the past, was honored to be recognized alongside the best of the best from across the globe.

He isn’t entirely sure what project he’ll take on next, but Clough knows he wants to return to the world show and is considering “some sort of a reptile” like a 40-pound snapping turtle “begging to get mounted.” In the meantime, he’ll be listening to music in the shop — Steely Dan is his all-time favorite — and stuffing animals for as long as he’s able.

There may not be as many active taxidermists as there used to be, but Clough has been encouraged by a resurgence of interest in hunting and fishing since the COVID-19 pandemic with license sales reaching all-time highs.

“I just really like telling stories with taxidermy, and with this being a political year, I just feel strongly about certain things like the Second Amendment. It seems like every time there’s a mass shooting, they want to put restrictions on guns and take them away. It’s really not the guns that are killing people, it’s the mental illness in this country that they need to address,” he said. “There’s just a high demand for taxidermy, and I enjoy doing it and talking to the hunters and being part of the fishing and hunting industry. It’s very labor intensive, it’s very time consuming, and luckily I have a wife that, she knows it’s part of my DNA (and) that I can’t help it. I’m totally addicted, and there’s no cure for it. There’s no cure, you’ve just gotta do it… If I don’t go fishing or hunting every day, I’m miserable, so that’s how I start my day every day. I mount anything that swims, flies, runs, crawls or slithers through the grass.”

Wildlife Creations is located at 1963 Vine Ave. and can be reached at (641) 753-9005.

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Contact Robert Maharry at 641-753-6611 ext. 255 or rmaharry@timesrepublican.com.

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