R. R. Branstrom | Daily Press | Tim Gorenchan, owner of North Country Legends Taxidermy, sculpts clay eyelids on what will be a buck mount. The antlers are real, and the hide from the animal will be stretched over the foam form, which has been supplemented with a plastic nose and glass eyes.

EDITOR NOTE: The Daily Press will be featuring a series of articles on local businesses, highlighting their history and what makes them unique. The series will run on a regular basis in the Daily Press.

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ESCANABA — A world-class taxidermist, skilled in producing lifelike mounts of all kinds, works in a quiet shop outside western Escanaba. North Country Legends Taxidermy, the business founded by Tim Gorenchan just about 20 years ago, operates out of a building in Delta County’s Wells Township that holds in its lobby an array of artful finished works — a buffalo licking its nose, a buck with what appears to be snow and ice clinging to its fur, a wolf chasing a trio of coyotes, a leaping salmon, a spiral-horned African kudu and more.

Gorenchan, though he became an engineer before getting into his current career, said that his interest in taxidermy was first sparked when he was a Cub Scout visiting U.P. Taxidermy on Ludington Street. But the curiosity lay dormant for a while.

Gorenchan was living downstate with his wife and working for a company based in Detroit when the couple got the opportunity to move back home to the Upper Peninsula, he said. After the move, he continued doing some engineering consulting work for about a year and a half, but when those projects began to wrap up, he sought a new path.

Gorenchan landed at the American Institute of Taxidermy in Boulder Junction, Wis., then brought his skills to Gladstone and founded North Country Legends in 2005.

“It started before I was even ready to start,” said Gorenchan. “Before I even finished school, I came home and there was a cooler with a caribou in it — before the shop was even ready.”

As he began his first taxidermy pieces in the fall of 2005, this was his 20th year. The bulk of work comes in between September and February, he said, and most jobs are deer mounts — “probably the bread and butter of any taxidermist.”

However, Gorenchan branches out quite a bit. He says he does everything, and that the steps to turn a carcass into a finished mount are more or less the same whether the creature is a mammal, bird, fish or reptile.

“Mounting a chipmunk is basically the same as mounting — anything. An elephant. It’s all the same thing. You have to take the skin off whatever you’re working on, make all your measurements to get what’s underneath the skin to be the right size. And once it’s the right size, quite honestly, it goes together awesome.”

Getting the form underneath the skin into the right size and shape can take a good amount of time, and how difficult a piece will be is often unknown at the beginning.

The forms are foam and relatively easy to work with, but “there’s an element of sculpting. There’s definitely elements of anatomy that you have to understand,” Gorenchan said.

He described a recent work for which the form was in the desired pose, but nowhere near the right size, so every piece had to be cut apart and altered.

“Everything from like the length of the (forelimb) was off, so I’d have to cut that, block it out, make it bigger, you know. The biceps were too small. Okay, so we gotta cut that. The belly was too small. So we gotta cut it, drop it, foam it back in. The neck was too small. … There wasn’t one piece of that form that I didn’t have to cut and put back together,” he said.

Also part of putting together a finished product are including and recreating other parts. Fake eyes and noses are produced by manufacturers — including Champions Choice, a taxidermy supply company run by Gorenchan and a partner, Clint Rickey of Wisconsin.

Clay is sculpted to form eye sockets; epoxy fills holes; painting, airbrushing and detailing produce hyperrealistic mimicry of skin, hair and scales.

At this point in Gorenchan’s career, his artistry is pretty masterful, so even the difficult, time-consuming projects come out beautifully, and it doesn’t appear that setbacks get to him.

A recently-completed rattlesnake sits on a counter, and though it’s been damaged by the spunky shop cat, Fatso, Gorenchan didn’t seem too bothered when explaining that he’d have to repair it.

When asked what helped his skills to develop, the taxidermist said that he gained the most from attending competitions. He started entering taxidermy competitions in 2010, beginning with the Wisconsin Taxidermists Association State Championship.

At such events, “people bring stuff from all over the state and all over the country, and you got a series of judges that look at it, and they put on seminars and things,” Gorenchan said. “So that is where I really started to learn a lot more in-depth techniques and things like that.”

He said that critiques of his work by judges from around the country and the pointers they offered were instrumental for growth.

Nine years ago, North Country Legends relocated from Gladstone to property that used to be part of a golf course on 13.75 Road (which is what Escanaba’s Eighth Avenue South becomes west of Meadowbrook Apartments). After adding onto the existing structures there, the taxidermy business moved into another building on the same plot a couple years later.

Gorenchan said that the type of mounts he especially enjoys and is most proud of are those of fish. Fish mounts, especially ones for shows that need to appear seamless, are tricky because fish skin is far more delicate than mammal hide. The finished product of many fish mounts use plastic fins, plastic heads, whatever was salvaged of the skin, and lots of craftsmanship to paint from reference photographs areas where the skin might have split or been otherwise damaged.

In addition to awards from state competitions, Gorenchan has taken home prizes from the World Taxidermy and Fish Carving Championships — multiple times. His coldwater fish have placed not only best in category but also best in show.

As of late, Gorenchan has been taking in less jobs than he did in years past, in part because his time has been occupied by the supply business and by traveling to judge competitions, and he doesn’t believe it fair to ask customers to wait a long time for their product.

In February, he’ll be travelling to Florida to judge a competition. This past summer, he was one of three judges of fish for the World Taxidermy and Fish Carving Championships that was held in Coralville, Iowa.

“That was a big honor. It’s kind of come full circle, almost,” Gorenchan said. “I don’t compete as heavily anymore. … It’s kind of ‘been there, done that,’ almost, after a while. It takes a lot of effort, and you just kind of get burned out.”

Even judging is a lot of work — there are hundreds of entries that must be inspected and critiqued.

Though he’s not actively seeking to take in new clients at the moment, Gorenchan does have several jobs underway. While the front reception area of North Country Legends Taxidermy is decked out with finished taxidermied animals of all kinds, paintings of an award-winning muskellunge mount Gorenchan completed for a customer a couple years ago, plaques and medals, the back shop area is where the work happens. Deer, bear and even a hunting dog are in various stages in the shop — in the process of being posed, sculpted, detailed or assembled in a scene — on their way to becoming finished works of art and sources of pride for those who know the stories behind them.