Teacher picks up $1 million gift

CORINNA – It was the strangest of parades.

In a brilliant fall sun, dozens of preserved animals were carried Wednesday afternoon from a tractor-trailer truck into a potato house built into a hill in Corinna.

There was a red stag from Austria, a pair of lions from Mozambique, caribou from the Arctic Circle and bighorn sheep from Russia. Leading the parade was Howard Whitten, a Nokomis Regional High School science teacher who offers the only high school taxidermy course in the country.

Whitten, who previously has convinced game wardens, sportsmen and museums to donate animals to his program – not to mention stopping on his way in to school to pick up roadkill – scored big this time. He convinced the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., to donate $1 million worth of stuffed and mounted animals, tanned and frozen hides, skulls and frozen specimens.

“I was ecstatic,” Whitten said, recalling the feeling when the Smithsonian notified him last April of the donation, one of the largest ever made by the esteemed institution nicknamed “America’s attic.” More than 400 specimens were donated.

The project, which will be shared jointly by the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor and SAD 48, began when Whitten took three students to the Smithsonian in 2001 to work on whale carcasses.

“I planted the seeds and although it took three years, this is the harvest,” the teacher said.

Volunteers from SAD 48 and the town of Newport assisted Whitten and COA staff and students Wednesday afternoon in securing the items at Corinna.

The collection is staggering – one set of horns alone is worth $8,000. There are elephant hides, a grizzly bear, hippopotamus mounts, an ostrich and a common vole – creating an inventory list of 13 pages of items ranging from fully mounted animals to skulls and hides.

The climate-controlled potato house, donated by potato farmers Terry Buck and Scott Paradis of Corinna,will be the perfect storage facility.

“These pieces of natural history will be made available to the people and students of Maine,” Whitten said. He said he is prepared to create a sort of lending library where schools and other institutions can borrow the specimens. The items were part of a personal collection donated to the Smithsonian several years ago by a man who wanted them to be used for educational purposes, the teacher said.

Stephen Ressel, COA museum director and professor of biology, was in awe as animal after animal was unloaded.

“It is hard to grasp the full impact of how this will enhance our museum and the education of our students,” Ressel said. “That this impressive collection came to Maine is both encouraging and promising.”

Once the animals were safely unloaded, Whitten admitted that the trip “had been torture.” He arrived in Washington, D.C., on Sunday and expected a 53-foot tractor trailer. A 48-footer showed up.

“We left about $30,000 worth of mounts in Washington in three crates,” Whitten said. Along the way home, he also dropped $35,000 worth of horns, antlers and frozen specimens in Gray at a separate storage facility.

Whitten said the mounts will be able to be displayed immediately.

“Taxidermy students will be working on the rest of the collection to prepare them for educational use,” he said. “The plan is to involve interdisciplinary work by using the art, science, industrial technology, graphic arts and language arts departments. Habitats will be built and information sheets will be written.”

But it was the reaction of Ressel’s students that showed how important the acquisitions truly were.

“Oh my God,” breathed Jessica Lach, 19, of Chicago. “He is so beautiful,” she said, referring to one of the deer specimens. “I’ve been looking forward to this for a long while.”