34 NEBRASKAland • AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 2016
fun, kind of like art class and all that,
but the reality is, a lot of it is in the
prep," O'Hare said. "It's just a lot of
getting ready to mount things."
When You Fight a Fish
(and Win)
The same is not true for fish.
Keyes, who owns and operates
Pheasant Hollow Taxidermy, started
taxidermy as a teenager by taking a
correspondence course through the
mail; he started with birds, shooting
starlings with his BB gun to give
himself something to practice on. Since
then he has expanded, working his way
through apprenticeships and hobby
taxidermy into his own business. He
says that when it
comes to fish, the
post-mount paint
work takes most
of the project's
time.
Similar to
other animals,
the skin is
removed from
the fish meat, but
with a fish, the
skin is "carded"–
tacked to foam
boards to dry
out and stabilize.
Because a high
percentage of
a fish is water, the fish skin shrinks
noticeably more than other animals.
The fish's face and fins, then, must be
rebuilt carefully.
Once the fish is dry and its shape
and size have been mostly restored,
the scales are sealed so the paint
doesn't soak in and Keyes begins
immortalizing the fish. A fish's color
is actually drawn from the skin, and
the scales add iridescence. Therefore,
to restore the shimmer and color of
the mount, Keyes uses metallic, pearl
and powder paints as well as makeups,
chalks and charcoal for painting and
scale-tipping.
"I try to put some art into my fish
especially," Keyes said.
However, Keyes' fish customers
have a second option; for catch-and-
release anglers or people fishing far
away, all that's needed is a picture.
Replicas are built from high-quality
forms ordered based on the fish you
caught but, for whatever reason,
don't want to bring in. To create
these replicas, Keyes also consults a
plethora of reference photos. Because
Daryl Keyes works with pins and plastic to protect the delicate fins as he finishes a fish mount.
JD Oenbring specializes in birds, which means she has quite the
collection of duck forms to choose from.
