Okay, here we go.

This is a European Starling skin.

It's wet now because it started through the washing process.

Earlier this year, we skinned it.

Unlike a mammal, you leave the bones in, birds' leg bones and wing bones.

This is a leg bone all clean.

The muscle is gone.

Here we have wing bone.

My name is Timothy Allen Bovard.

I'm the staff taxidermist for the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

I've been on staff for 40 years.

A reframing diorama hall starts with Getty Support as part of their PST exhibit series where the connection was the crossover between science and art.

Luckily for me, the museum decided that what's a great crossover to show people is dioramas.

We decided, where are we going to put that exhibit?

We had a fourth diorama hall, that was called the Exotic Mammal Hall, that had been closed for more than 30 years.

The biggest concern was animals were being wiped out.

They're disappearing at a tremendous rate.

How are we going to highlight that?

How are we going to inspire people?

Well, let's show them that animal.

It's interesting when you look at a bird, right?

Most people don't realize how much bare skin there is on a bird unless they're wet.

There is lots of bare skin.

This bird has kept its feathers.

I'm going to turn it inside out so we can see the skull.

There's still a little flesh that has to come off there.

I'm going to clean that off, do a last little cleaning here on the head.

In this exhibit, we're trying to highlight the loss that happened to bird populations all over the world.

On the floor beneath it is skeletons, piled up skeletons.

These would have been albatross on an island where our director at the time in 1911 went to this island, and there were lots of birds, and he went back shortly thereafter, and there were zero live birds left.

All he saw was piles of bones.

For me, what we're trying to do, I think we have a better collective understanding about the importance of habitat, but we still gotta keep to keep going on it.

Dioramas go back to, really, the turn of the last century, when instead of something like our bird hall, where everything is lined up and organized on shelves, the idea was let's try and do something that's more natural, that's more captivating.

My first memory of seeing dioramas in a museum was here at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, when my mom would come in, and she would bring me here.

That was certainly a happy place for me.

The fascination when I got here was, "Wow, look at that diorama.

It really looks like a real place, like a place I could go."

I would wander our diorama halls, and I was fascinated.

Dioramas, you can build around anything.

The first thing when I'm trying to plan a diorama, or even when I'm looking at our existing dioramas and trying to get an idea of what they were going for, is, what is the perspective, right?

What's going to be the focal point?

As far as the animal, there should be some sort of a flow.

We like looking at things and having them be regular organization.

Well, that's not the way nature is.

Nature is naturally irregular.

You got to work to create that.

Now I'm going to need to fluff the bird a little bit.

I use a fluffing compound to dry out the feathers.

If you think about birds, one of the things they do is you see them, and they take a dust bath.

They'll fluff in.

I just basically did the same thing.

So now we need a body.

What I do when I'm making a body is I wrap some stuff called excelsior.

It's a wood wool material.

I'm just going to take it and sort of mold it in my hands, take my thread.

I'm just going to take, and I'm going to wrap that.

You can see it's starting to shape up.

It's a little small.

I'm going to add just a little more to it.

When I'm doing birds, I want the body to be a little bit loose.

It's actually pretty close.

I'm just going to finish wrapping this up, something like that.

It's a little rounded on the back.

It's fairly full in the chest, sort of an “A” shape, narrow in the hips, back at the pelvis, and then wider, of course, at the wings.

As a kid, the way I found out about taxidermy was reading books.

When I was 10 years old, that's what I did, reading and learning everything I could that way.

My parents, when I brought home a roadkill skunk at 11, they're, "What are you going to do with that?"

I said, "Well, I have the booklets and stuff.

I'm going to do taxidermy on it."

You got to have tolerant parents.

The fascination that I had there as a kid is still what I have today.

I've learned a few more things, of course, over the years of how to create the illusion of life, but it's still taking that animal, whatever it might be, and trying to bring it back to a representation of itself.

I'm going to take one of these wires and run it through, bend it down, back up.

That's going to be my neck wire.

I'm going to tie it down a little bit.

Now I need to run that neck wire into my skull.

It's going to run through the skull into the upper mandible.

I'm going to ease everything down a little bit, make sure everything is flowing where it should be.

Now if it's going to be considered art, now is where that artistic thing happens because I could raise the wings, I could lower the wings.

I can make a decision about the final look for the bird after it's assembled because I can move it around.

This little starling is going to be beautiful.

Is it art?

Or is it scientific illustration?

Well, that's for you, the viewer, to decide.

Do I think animals are artistic?

Oh, yes, I do.

Nature is all around us.

You don't have to be out in the wilderness.

You can walk through your neighborhood and you can see wildlife.

Right?

If you look for it.