OLDS — An Olds taxidermist took second place in two events in the master’s division of the World Taxidermy Championships in Iowa in August.
Steve Von Hagen is pretty proud of that accomplishment.
“It had been 25 years since I've competed at that level,” he said during an interview with the Albertan.
“I had competed in 1999 and at that time I got a third overall in the world. That was with a caribou piece that I entered back then.
“It was kind of fun to enter that kind of stage again 25 years later and still feel like I held my own at that level.”
Von Hagen 59, has been doing taxidermy for roughly 34 years. He’s originally from Weyburn, Saskatchewan and still operates a taxidermy business there. He’s now into his second hunting season operating a taxidermy business in Olds.
Von Hagen moved to Olds from Calgary about two years ago with his wife Jackie. They knew each other back in Weyburn and have been married now for about three years.
Von Hagen says he and many fellow workers in the field prefer the term “wildlife artist” because they feel that better reflects the creativity involved in the industry. Hence, the official name of the business is Team Tundra Wildlife Artists.
It all began for Von Hagen when, while working in the oilpatch, one of his friends asked him to go bow hunting with him.
“I didn't even know that was such a thing. I thought bow hunting ended with Robin Hood,” he said.
But he got into it pretty quickly.
“I fell in love with all things wild, and whether that's the wind in my face or the rain on my back or the family raccoons that walks by while you're sitting in a deer blind.”
Von Hagen soon realized that he and his friends had to go out of town to get their trophies mounted, so that gave him the idea to become a taxidermist in Weyburn.
He went to taxidermy school in Iowa, then obtained tutoring from a world champion taxidermist.
“I do say that in those early years, I invested very similar to what it might have cost to get a college degree,” Von Hagen said. “I invested about $70,000 in my education way back then.
“There is no degree and there's no journeymanship. It just takes years to do what I can do.”
In Olds, Von Hagen works with a couple of part-time workers: Scott Prysunka, a retired oilpatch employee who is a skilled airbrush artist, and Dallas Mauck, a farmer who used to work for a former taxidermy business in town.
Three part-time employees also work for Team Tundra in Weyburn.
Von Hagen estimates he travels back and forth to Weyburn about six times a year to do taxidermy work there.
He admits that’s a lot of driving, but says he does so partly for sentimental reasons – that’s where his career started – but also because he has clients there as well as family and friends that he and Jackie like to visit. In fact, they’ve kept a home there as well.
Von Hagen says over the years he’s done work for some major players in the hunting industry, like Cabela’s and Bass Pro.
He also created a replica for Milo Hanson of his world record Hanson Buck. It sits prominently in the Hanson home.
Von Hagen is perhaps most proud of receiving a distinguished service award from McKenzie Taxidermy Supply. He feels proud and gratified to be recognized by his peers in the industry.
On the day the Albertan was on-site, Prysunka was working with von Hagen.
Von Hagen says the price for the work he does essentially depends on the size of the animal. For example, he said the price for working on an elk is about $2,750, and in the range of $3,300 for a moose.
“These big bears take me about 90 hours (to work on),” Von Hagen said. “Something like that moose head, close to 40. A dear head about 24. It’s a very labour-intensive thing. Nothing happens fast here.”
Von Hagen obtains moulds for animals from suppliers and generally gets the skins tanned (turned into leather) elsewhere.
He then uses all his expertise to make sure the hide fits and the animal looks real – including the pose.
Each project is unique.
“Every animal, they’re as different as people, and so there’s skinny bears and fat bears. There’s pretty bears and there’s ugly bears. There’s bears with big ears bears with no ears.
“We don’t really see that as humans. We see a moose is a moose is a moose. But when you get a few hundred or a few thousand deer heads across your work bench in a career, they’re all different; they all fit different.
“And so then your job as a taxidermist is to alter this. We’re going to cut this up and change the pose to match what the customer wants,” he said.
“You really have to know anatomy and as we change it, what muscles are working and what muscles would be relaxed as we change position.”
Clients from around the world use Von Hagen’s services: from the North West Territories to Europe, Africa and New Zealand.
Among his projects is a request from a customer, a local resident, to turn the feet from an elephant into footstools and the hide into cowboy boots. Von Hagen said they won’t make the cowboy boots but will likely tan the leather for them.
Von Hagen noted an elephant ear is roughly the shape of Africa, so they will be turned into pieces of art that can be hung on a wall.
The meat, he said, was given to an African village.
He showed an elephant foot that had been preserved in salt.
“They just keep putting salt until it dries. It’s like a piece of plywood. It’s like if you step on it you can actually crack it. You can break an ear off if you step on a salted skin, it’s that dry and sort of brittle,” he said.
“Through the salt drying, it’s preserved more or less indefinitely. You can have skins for 10 years in that salt-dried state, it’s just preserved, as long as you keep it dry.”
There is a downside to all that international ferrying back and forth of animals though.
“All the wildlife regulations worldwide to protect wildlife. It’s a big deal, it’s huge international agreements to protect wildlife and to monitor any shipping and who’s shipping and what the species are and who’s hunting what,” Von Hagen said.
“And so of course, I mean it’s unreal the documents I have to have in order to move wildlife internationally.”
Von Hagen said he can spend a few hours – maybe half a day – just filling out paperwork for that. And that paperwork has to be done precisely the way each country wants, or it gets rejected.
“So we’ve become actually experts in logistics, in moving wildlife items internationally,” he said.
He’s also in the midst of completing an order, through a broker, to mount six polar bears for a museum in China.
Von Hagen was asked what he likes about taxidermy.
“I think it’s the creativity,” he said. “It’s such a creative outlet. It’s just an awesome thing to get to do every day. Like, who doesn’t like to play with a bucket of paint (like) back in the school days?”
Also, he said, he loves to work with his hands. That goes back to the oil patch and growing up on the farm.
