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Miranda Patterson Jones made an interesting career change.
Dan Smith
Miranda Patterson Jones was feeling closed in and needed a change. She’d worked for a bank in Forest and as a manager for Kroger. “I liked the people and I liked being helpful,” she says, but something was missing. That would be the outdoors, where she grew up hunting with her dad.
The solution for the recently married 28-year-old was to move into a building on her family’s Bedford County property (Patterson Brothers Paving) and set up a studio, Otter Creek Taxidermy. She spent two sessions at the Dan Rinehart School of Taxidermy in Wisconsin—a full month—learning to make dead animals look alive again.
Patterson Jones hunted for years with her father with both bows and guns. It was, so to speak, in her blood. She expected “to do maybe 10 deer heads in the first year.” She did 150 in the first five months, mostly serving hunters within about 50 miles of her studio. Her work costs about $350 for a deer head, $250 for a bird, $500 for a coyote. Miranda also “processes” deer for their meat and stores them in a walk-in refrigerator.
ottercreektaxidermy@gmail.com
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