ick Oehlenschlager’s office is crowded with so much unusual visual stimuli that it’s often hard for a visitor to follow the man’s enthusiastic torrent of conversation. There is a dead grouse splayed on its back on a newspaper atop a desk. There are tottering stacks of mounted plant specimens, various skeletons, and shelves jammed with obscure volumes on botany, ornithology, and all manner of biological arcana. There, too, are Oehlenschlager’s own publications, including Notes on the Prairie Vole—Microtus Ochrogaster—in Wadena County, Minnesota and something called Avian Distribution and Abundance Records for the Sierra de los Tuxtlas, Veracruz, Mexico. Oehlenschlager mentions that his great-grandfather lived in a palace in Denmark and was the country’s poet laureate; he wrote Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, as well as the words to the Danish National Anthem. There’s his ornately framed portrait, in fact, leaning against piles of books on the floor.
Oehlenschlager is the assistant curator of biology and the manager of biological collections for the Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul. In the basement of the museum, in a warren of rooms that is equal parts laboratory and sprawling curiosity cabinet, he spends his days sorting and cataloging and skinning and preserving everything from insects to songbirds to bald eagles to groundhogs. The creatures he cannot skin and stuff he’ll deposit into a large tank, where they’ll be stripped down to the skeleton by hundreds of thousands of swarming hide beetles.
One recent afternoon, Oehlenschlager had his hands buried in the chest cavity of a great horned owl that was laid out on a table. The owl was a roadkill victim, transported to Oehlenschlager in the back of a pickup truck. He was making easy work of separating the skin from the carcass, but temporarily abandoned the process to give some visitors a tour of his subterranean workshop.
He led the way down the hall to the osteo room, which houses a collection of bones that includes the remains of Billy the Bison, Don the Gorilla, and Rosa, a circus elephant originally buried on a family farm. En route, Oehlenschlager admitted, “I did eat an owl once—a boreal owl—out of sheer lunacy. It was just a little experiment on my part, and I can tell you that an owl tastes like nothing else.” He has also, he said, eaten all sorts of other animals it wouldn’t occur to the average person to put in his mouth, including crow, boa constrictor, and groundhogs, which he claims are mighty tasty.
Oehlenschlager is pretty much a one-man gang, and the enormity of his task was apparent as he hustled through the various collections he presides over—the fluid room, where various specimens are preserved in jars; the bird and mammal banks, whose morgue-style cabinets are crammed floor to ceiling with stuffed creatures; and the bug room, with its hundreds of drawers of beetles, butterflies, moths, and other insects.
“If I live forever, I’d never run out of things to do down here,” Oehlenschlager said. “And I don’t have any intention of retiring. I’d rather keep working, working, working. There’s always something strange and challenging coming through the door. I recently had somebody bring me a black widow spider that they plucked off the luggage carousel at the airport.”
—Brad Zellar
Leave a Reply