OZARKS JOURNAL (draft article) SPRINGFIELD, Mo. — They entered through the convention hall lobby - a mounted menagerie of mammals, birds and fish whose owners paused in the natural light to primp before the show. A man in a camouflage cap tweezed a pheasants’ plumage into place. Another man wielding a blow vac fluffed the mane of a lion suspended mid-pounce over a warthog. Amy Ritchie Carter, 28, from Statesville, N.C., groomed a sable-coated fisher atop a snowy pedestal. “He has to look his best for the judges,” Ms. Ritchie Carter said. “I try to get the hair to stand up, because, you know, he’s cold. He’s in the snow. He’s going to be very bristled up.” At the World Taxidermy and Fish Carving Championships, lifelike detail and design were everything. Taxidermists from nearly every state and as far away as New Zealand arrived in this city of 160,000 people in the Ozarks to submit their best turkey or bluegill or caracal in exchange for a critique and perhaps a ribbon. Judges selected a handful of world titles and one Best in Show. “This is it. Ain’t no bigger, better or higher,” Danny Keener, of Choctaw, Okla., said about the level of competition. He lifted the coarse fur on the back of his collared peccary to reveal a small nodule. “It’s a recreated scent gland,” Mr. Keener said. “Most customers wouldn’t even know to look for it, but a judge will.” In the United States, competitive taxidermy became popular in the 1970s. The World Taxidermy Championships started in 1983 as a way to elevate the quality of taxidermy and share knowledge. In addition to the competition, this event, which drew nearly 500 registrants, hosted seminars and a trade show. Suppliers offered deals on the latest tools of the trade: tanning agents, polymers and urethane body parts. Taxidermists in a live sculpting competition shaped clay bodies over foam-encrusted skeletons. Seminars had titles like “Carcass Casting Piglets” and “Mounting a Flying Wood Duck.” The atmosphere was more art school or anatomy lab than hunter’s man-cave. If this year’s championships were any indication, the demographics of taxidermy — which have traditionally skewed white, male and rural — are shifting. Larry Blomquist, publisher of the taxidermy trade magazine Breakthrough, has operated the championships since 1988. “We have more ladies entered in the competition this year than just about any year I can remember,” Mr. Blomquist said. A group of 10 women taxidermists arrived from Los Angeles with Allis Markham, 32, sporting modish dresses, two-tone hair and tattoos. In 2011, Ms. Markham left a six-figure salary as director of social media strategy for the Disney Corporation to apprentice under Tim Bovard, the lead taxidermist at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. She later founded Prey Taxidermy, a studio and classroom. “I thought why not leave working in bleeding-edge technology to do something that was popular in the Victorian era,” said Ms. Markham, who described a yearning to trade the digital life for a more tactile one. “Yeah, that’s a good career move.” In an earlier interview, Ms. Markham remarked on taxidermy’s growing popularity among the “hip urban demographic.” There’s a view, she said, that taxidermy’s new devotees are “taking it less seriously than these gentlemen who’ve been doing this for years. I hope that perception is not placed on me. They don’t want to be seen as hicks and hillbillies, and we don’t want to be seen as a bunch of girls doing this as something besides their hair.” The night before the competition started, Ms. Markham and her entourage gathered in a hotel room to put the finishing touches on their pieces, mostly small birds donated from pet stores, aviaries and zoos. “This is one way to get really, really up close to an animal and know everything about it inside and out,” Ms. Markham said as she mounted a plush-crested jay on a black pedestal. Hannah Juarez, 26, sat nearby grooming a European starling. “I like the skinning process,” she said in a whimsical tone. “It’s like my favorite part. It’s so therapeutic to just sit and skin things.” At the show, Ms. Markham and her group walked around, a documentary film crew on their trail. “This is all just epic to me,” she said. “To have seen taxidermy in boutiques or antique stores and then to look around here and be like, oh, this is the level.” On Day 2, with over 500 pieces of taxidermy positioned about the convention hall, the doors closed and the judges, 21 men and one woman, got to work. Like doctors examining patients, they groped for inconsistencies and inspected eyes and orifices with flashlights and magnifying optics. They were former world champions keen to the minute anatomical details and species-specific behaviors that would be lost on most consumers simply looking to mount a trophy. Points were added or subtracted based on the quality of nictitating membranes, ear veins and genitalia. As in any elite competition, nerves could run ragged. Pete Ciraulo, 49, drove from Idaho with a canvasback duck he shot and mounted atop a glossy pool framed with rope. His work at last submitted, he looked underslept. The night before, he explained, a hotel manager threatened to eject him after someone reported seeing him hanging out a sixth-floor window. Mr. Ciraulo had been in his room trying to repair his pool of water, which he created from resin, when the piece caught fire. “It’s been a really bad time,” he said. “The pressure got to me.” Raymond Kowalski, a mammal judge, explained that taxidermy’s goal has evolved from merely replicating an animal’s appearance to creating a snapshot of its behavior and habitat: “It’s about the artistic ability of the taxidermist to tell a story, what happened here. It’s no longer Grandpap’s deer head on the wall. It’s wildlife art.” In the end, Best in Show went to the birds: a pair of ring-necked pheasants fixed in balletic aerial combat. The winning taxidermist was Lowell Shapley, 35, a wildlife muralist and egg farmer in Wanette, Okla., who does taxidermy for the Houston Museum of Natural Science and has triumphed here before. In 2011 his keel-billed toucan swept the top awards, including the Carl E. Akeley Award for artistry, named for the patriarch of modern taxidermy, who in the 1920s created many of the dioramas inside the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Judges and competitors alike marveled at how Mr. Shapley’s entire vertical composition balanced on two tail feathers. “After a lot of trial and error,” he said, “I was able to pull a little bit of life back into the feathers using some very fine wire and a little bit of ingenuity.” “If you want to try something new or different,” he added, “this is where to do it.”