Jim Reimer’s Wildlife Museum – A Dream Realized

While I was the Curator at the Assiniboine Park Zoo, I received a visit one afternoon from a gentleman named Jim Reimer. He informed me that he often came to the Zoo to photograph and study the animals, and then finally revealed his long-held dream project – to use his experience as a taxidermist to establish a natural history museum at his home property at Ste. Anne, Manitoba. He went on to describe how he planned to convert two large buildings (formerly hosting his honeybee operation) into exhibit halls. He enquired whether it would be possible to acquire deceased zoo animals for his museum. Being a former curator at the Manitoba Museum, I had always been a keen supporter of salvaging wildlife specimens for research and education, so I gladly arranged for Jim’s request with the Zoo’s veterinarian. A frozen Arctic Fox and an American Flamingo were available at the time.

Over the years, Jim and I became close friends, travelling together on day-long trips around southern Manitoba, and annual excursions as far afield as Florida, Texas, Arizona, South Dakota, Colorado, and Oregon. While I focused on collecting beetles and other insects, Jim recorded bird sightings, collected moths, and took photographs of landscapes and wildlife. Several times each year, I take friends to visit Jim and to enjoy examining his new exhibits. Having observed wildlife dioramas at dozens of major museums, and obtained mounted animals from other taxidermists over the years for the Manitoba Museum and the Oak Hammock Marsh Interpretive Centre, I became increasing aware of just how talented and innovative he was in preparing and exhibiting specimens, from a huge Swordfish, Grizzly, and Muskox to a giant Indian Python, dinosaur fossils, 80 wood-carved and painted coral-reef fish, bird eggs, and tiny insects. As an example, he prepared a Black-billed Magpie with one-half of the body feathered, and the other half with the skeleton exposed to reveal the bird’s delicate supporting structure. Intact frozen fish from Chinese markets in Winnipeg were skinned, mounted, and painted so realistically that they appeared to be just hauled from tropical seas. A variety of fresh-looking fruits and vegetables were expertly recreated in plaster or rubber and painted in fine detail. Pleasingly shaped pieces of driftwood, a rusty section of barbed wire wrapped around a weathered post, an abandoned bird house, a fossilized Bison horn core, and anything from Nature that caught his artistic eye, found a place as a wildlife prop in his ever-expanding museum.

Jim began his interest in taxidermy at age 13, when his mother helped him with mail-order taxidermy lessons costing $10 ($2 down, and $1 per month). He admitted his start was a very rough one, but eventually his persistence prevailed, and he received his taxidermy diploma at age 15. Jim pursued a career in beekeeping for the next three decades, producing many tonnes of honey. During the winters, Jim continued his commercial taxidermy, along with other part-time jobs. After retirement, he looked at his two unused honey buildings and wondered what he could do with them.

Then one day, his former dream of a natural history museum came to mind and turned instantly into an all-encompassing passion. Over the next decade, he worked steadily on his project, giving up all commercial taxidermy requests. Receiving endorsements and permits from both Provincial and Federal governments, he was allowed to salvage dead specimens, the vast majority coming from road kills and natural deaths (Jim does not hunt.). He also received specimens from friends, neighbours, the Assiniboine Park Zoo, University of Manitoba, Wildlife Haven Rehabilitation Centre, Westman Reptile Centre, Canadian Wildlife Service, and Manitoba Conservation. Hunters and trappers have provided a few large specimens such as Grey Wolf, Cougar, and Wolverine. Jim has now filled about 200 square metres of space, and he is currently constructing an adjoining building to accommodate the hundreds of specimens already mounted or stored in his freezer.

Jim has utilized his carpentry skills to manufacture all his exhibit cases and specimen storage cabinets (two of which he made to house some of my insect collection). Visitors marvel at displays of spectacular butterflies, moths, beetles, and many other kinds of arthropods. In fact, he hosts,which is likely the largest display of insects in the province, and hundreds of other insects (collected during our field trips) are stored in dozens of trays inside his entomological cabinets. Other eye-catching exhibits are mounts of local fishes shown against a rocky background, songbirds, pheasants, raptors, eggs, seashells, fur bearers, skulls, fossils, replicas of the thigh bone and tusk of a mammoth, and a partial tooth of a mammoth Jim found in his family’s gravel quarry behind his house. Other displays reveal a diversity of seeds and fruits from around the world.

Jim is an expert wildlife photographer and passionate birder, with a history of travel to exotic locals that would be the envy of any naturalist – Russia (Moscow to Siberia), Burkina Faso, Papua New Guinea, Australia, Mexico, Belize, Honduras, Haiti, Venezuela, Brazil, and others. In addition to photographing Nature and people at these locations, he has contributed his time and skills to construction projects such as schools, benefiting the lives of local people.