There were a lot of owl specimens on display at the museum. Primarily, I enjoyed it for the ability to compare the sizes between the species I haven't seen in person yet.
Also, while I prefer animals to be alive, these allow me to get much closer than would typically be possible.
With that said, taxidermy seems to have come a very long way over the years.
This Great Horned Owl hunting a skunk was a beautiful twilight diarama that almost looks alive. I took about a dozen pictures of it even though they all came out the same. It was an amazing work, and again, I'd prefer my owls and skunks alive, but this was beautiful for preserved specimens.
Here's just the owl itself:
While this display scores a 10/10, others were a bit less accurate to what I hope they looked like when they were alive. Let's review the others and see how others have done in their attempts to preserve these animals.
Note: Didn't realize just how many there were here until now! My fingers are tired! ๐ตโ๐ซ
Taxidermied animals always kinda creep me out. Some of these are very unfortunate looking. (My poor saw-whets.) That GHO diorama looks pretty nice though.
Modern ones are pretty good. I think it was more your amateur scientist doing it themself back in the day, so some of these old ones are not so hot, and I always hope they met their end naturally and weren't killed to be turned into this.