Anthony Devlin / AP Photo How did taxidermy become so hip? Melissa Milgrom on why the Victorian fascination with stuffing animals has become the hot new thing among hipsters and urbanites. 
 
 Sitting in Observatory, an art galley and events space in the newly hip Gowanus section of Brooklyn, Joanna Ebenstein clicked JPEGs of taxidermy that she has traveled the world to photograph. Her passion for the preserved is as far from country-kitsch as the toxic Gowanus is from the meandering Mississippi. “Taxidermy is more acceptable now. It’s the embarrassing thing in the basement, but now it’s cool.” 
 
 For Ebenstein and a growing number of urban enthusiasts, taxidermy is more than just a stuffed animal; it’s an experience, the tactile opposite of a world that communicates in bits and bytes. “It is a deeply intimate encounter,” explains Rachel Poliquin, curator and scholar, whose taxidermy blog Ravishing Beasts began as a post-doctoral project; now it gets around 800 hits a day. Last month, Poliquin curated a taxidermy exhibit at the Vancouver Museum; wildly popular, the exhibit aroused deep empathy for animals in a city the museum thought would balk at the show. 
 
 “If the mainstream reaction to taxidermy is to be creeped out—a reaction that produces a strong reaction on its own—the counter-culture reaction is to be fascinated and unflinching.” 
 
 Mike Zohn, co-owner of Obscura Antiques and Oddities, has sold taxidermy from his East Village shop since 1991. But lately the shrieks of horror have become squeals of delight. No matter that these folks can’t tell a deer head from a moose, or that they were raised in the suburbs and do not hunt. “I just sold a half-dozen antelope, deer, and elk heads to Juicy Couture to use to decorate their stores,” he says. 
 
 Walk around New York City and you’ll find taxidermy everywhere. It’s in hip restaurants such as Freemans and in the display windows of posh stores such as Bergdorf Goodman; even Urban Outfitters sells cardboard deer heads. Taxidermy is used as movie props, in fashion shoots, in sculpture, and in shelter magazines. What is Build-A-Bear Workshop but taxidermy for kids? As our collective experience becomes more urban (and suburban), what once was familiar—wildlife and the outdoors—is now exotic. 
 
 “Taxidermy offers a unique opportunity: to own an animal. In a big city, a stuffed pheasant is strange. In the country, it is rote,” says Scott Bibus, a taxidermist and prop maker in Florida who co-founded the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists, a collective of artists who use unconventional taxidermy in their artworks. 
 
 In the Victorian era, taxidermy was a craze. As naturalists brought exotic species home from other continents, armchair enthusiasts filled their parlors and drawing rooms with domed birds, butterfly cases, even their stuffed pets. Back then, every hoof and claw was transformed into some exciting new object: everything from “zoological lamps” (kerosene lamps made out of preserved monkeys, swans, and other creatures) to “His” and “Her” elephant heads. Some hairstyles even incorporated preserved humming birds. Soon every town in England could support a part-time taxidermist. In fact, taxidermy was a prerequisite skill for any serious naturalist—including Charles Darwin, who hired a freed Guyanese slave to give him lessons; otherwise he never would have qualified for the position of naturalist aboard the H.M.S. Beagle. 
 
 We may need the illusion of nature more than the Victorians needed the exotica of it. As animals vanish at an alarming rate of 1,000 times faster than in the past, we crave facsimiles. No wonder taxidermy is making a comeback; nothing is a more visceral souvenir. Because taxidermy uses “derma” (skin) to create a lifelike replica, a preserved creature triggers deep emotions in us. Indeed, the 19th-century French poet Charles Baudelaire likened the “brutal and enormous magic” of dioramas to theater: “These things because they are false are infinitely closer to the truth.” 
 
 We, like the Victorians, are ravenous collectors. Yet in addition to being a generation of “cabinetists” (people who form collections of natural history artifacts), we are increasingly willing to get our hands bloody because that’s an even more direct experience. Brooklyn-based Melissa Dixson has become the media’s poster child for urban taxidermy, even though she’s only been a taxidermist for three years. “I’m in my thirties. I’m not part of the hipster subculture. But at the same time I get emails every day from art students and they’re all women—vegetarians who want to learn taxidermy.” 
 
 Dixson recently competed in the Secret Science Club’s annual taxidermy competition. The Secret Science Club is an underground lecture series based in New York City. Only two or three actual taxidermists out of a crowd of 500 people attended the 2009 contest, but who cares? Unlike, say, the World Taxidermy Championships, where hundreds of taxidermists celebrate mechanistic perfection, here people want to be shocked and entertained by the distorted and the bizarre. “For the urbanites, it’s not just straight taxidermy—it’s more twisted—and fun. Everyone loves a jackalope postcard and this is taking that to the nth degree,” says Secret Science Club co-founder Margaret Mittelbach. 
 
 “Part of being cool is to appear fearless in the face of the intentionally ignored and frightening. So if the mainstream reaction to taxidermy is to be creeped out—a reaction that produces a strong reaction on its own—the counter-culture reaction is to be fascinated and unflinching,” says Bibus. 
 
 Unlike Victorians fascination with freaks (two-headed lambs; pickled Siamese piglets) and anthropomorphic scenes (kittens dressed as brides; athletic toads), traditional taxidermists prize the ideal specimen, the archetype. No two animals are alike, so each mount is one-of-a-kind. It is an incredibly difficult and exacting process. And when you consider that a fleshy-faced gorilla is nothing like a delicate tree sparrow or that a rhino’s thick hide is completely different from a python’s scales, you can understand how far-ranging a taxidermist’s anatomical knowledge and artistic skill must be. Some taxidermists actually remove and reinsert each whisker individually by hand to support their biological narrative. A tiger’s whiskers can purr or attack depending on how they are manipulated. This striving to duplicate what nature has already created is the taxidermist’s gift to a culture that has become estranged from nature yet desires it, and it’s fascinating to watch urban enthusiasts re-contextualize this in their own idiosyncratic ways. 
 
 In a digital culture where images are disseminated in nanoseconds, taxidermy is a tactile reminder of what it means to be human, an integral part of the natural world. “You might feel distanced from your food, then read Omnivore’s Dilemma and want to explore sustainable agriculture,” says Rogue taxidermist Robert Marbury. “This is also a means to battle disconnectedness.” 
 
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 Melissa Milgrom has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Travel & Leisure, among other publications; she has also produced segments for public radio. Milgrom lives in New York City. Please visit www.melissamilgrom.com. 
 
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 One of the priciest spirits I’ve ever tasted was a clear whiskey poured from a green 12-ounce Sierra Mist bottle. Max Watman, who held the bottle like a Parisian sommelier, told me it cost about $120—roughly what he’d paid in drinks and meals to people who introduced him to other people up the Virginia moonshine supply chain as he went about procuring it. He poured us each an ounce or so into elegant tasting glasses. We sipped. Watman made a face that was not the face of someone having an especially good time. He described it as “bile with some simple syrup.” In my tasting notes, I wrote: “musty,” “rancid,” “Alpo.” 
 
 The enduring archetype of the hillbilly moonshiner can be traced to an 1877 article in Harper’s Weekly titled “The Moonshine Man: A Peep Into His Haunts and Hiding-Places.” It portrayed a poor, illiterate, blue-jean-clad rustic with “an old slouch hat shaped in semi-Continental style.” This image evolved over the decades, and the moonshiner became fixed as a corncob-pipe-smoking craftsman filling stoneware jugs with a clear and tasty elixir while keeping an eye out for pesky revenuers. 
 
 
 
 Video: Max Watman shares some of his favorite moonshines with Atlantic staff editor Rachael Brown and Atlantic food contributor Derek Brown 
 
 Watman’s new book, Chasing the White Dog: An Amateur Outlaw’s Adventures in Moonshine, brings the image up to date. Rural bootleggers still exist, he says, but the steampunkish copper still of the Appalachian hollow has mostly been replaced by low-rent industrial complexes in the mountain South that crank out cheap liquor made from white sugar. (That’s what was in the Sierra Mist bottle.) The chief attribute of this liquor is that it’s unencumbered by taxes. Much of it ends up in rural nip houses, where a jar of white dog (no one seems to know where the name comes from) can be had for a dollar. 
 
 But Watman reports that refined moonshining hasn’t died—in fact, it’s booming today, taken up by a new generation, mostly in big cities and micropolitan towns. Practitioners make tiny batches not to resell, but mostly to see what sorts of goodness they can concoct. “It’s the same people who drove the home-brewing trend, and they’re just as dorky,” Watman said. “It tends to attract tattoo guys and the more outré farmers’-market types, although in the mountain states the practitioners are a little more snowboardy.” 
 
 The science of making small-batch, high-proof alcohol has remained largely unchanged for centuries. You let yeast perform its magic on something containing sugar (fruit, corn, molasses) mashed up in water. Then you separate the alcohol by boiling the potion and capturing the steam. (Alcohol boils at a lower temperature than water.) 
 
 I watched the process in action one drizzly, cold evening in a shed behind the house of a white-collar moonshiner I’d recently met. For purposes of plausible deniability (making your own liquor in any quantity is still illegal), let’s call him “Max Watman.” “Max” had mashed up some apricots, added brown sugar, water, and yeast, and let the mess ferment for a week. He then decanted the pulpy slurry into an Erlenmeyer flask set atop an electric hot plate. The flask was connected to a copper coil that passed through a pan of ice water balanced on a snare-drum stand. Max turned on the burner, and we waited. 
 
 The first alcohol that trickles out of the still—called the heads—smells like nail polish. You really don’t want to drink this. Nor do you want to drink the end of the run—called the tails—which contains heavier alcohol and is funky, but not in a good way. The trick is, you do want to capture a little of each, to give character to the middle of the run, called the heart. The craft comes in knowing when to begin and end collecting the alcohol. This can be done with precise measurements, but Max prefers to wing it, as he imagines 18th-century home distillers did. As a result, batches from the same base can vary widely, and some offer even bigger surprises. “One batch, I took a sip, half my face went numb,” he said. “And then I tasted cocoa.” 
 
 The distillate started to drip from the end of the copper coil, and Max hovered attentively, diverting clear condensate into a shot glass, sniffing intently, and tasting with his fingertip. After 20 minutes, he cut the heat, tested the effluent for alcohol content, and then diluted it slightly with water. We sipped. And it was … quite good, actually. My face did not go numb. I tasted no cocoa. It was a bit hot on the tongue—some aging would temper that—but a subtle apricot flavor came through on the finish. It tasted, for a moment, like a fleeting memory of summer. 
 
 Wayne Curtis is an Atlantic contributing editor.
– Hipster faves fixed-gear bikes, v-neck T-shirts, and ironic mustaches have a pair of new, and very red-neck, companions: Taxidermy and moonshine. The former, Melissa Milgrom reports for the Daily Beast, gives actual and spiritual Williamsburgers the chance to actually own an animal. And, one practitioner notes, “part of being cool is to appear fearless in the face of the intentionally ignored and frightening. So if the mainstream reaction to taxidermy is to be creeped out—a reaction that produces a strong reaction on its own—the counter-culture reaction is to be fascinated and unflinching.” To get a backcountry buzz, meanwhile, Wayne Curtis finds that the process of getting liquor out of white sugar and whatever else aficionados are tempted to add has moved from “the steampunkish copper still of the Appalachian hollow” to cities, attracting “the same people who drove the home-brewing trend, and they’re just as dorky,” one moonshiner tells the Atlantic.