Harvey Dault

Harvey Dault, 84, of Hesperia, died Tuesday, March 24, 2026, at home. A taxidermist and trapper of rare and patient skill, he spent sixty years turning the deer, birds, and fish of West Michigan into mounts so lifelike that the state's own biologists drove out to his workshop to learn from them.

He was born November 8, 1941, in Hesperia, the son of Leon and Vada Dault, and was running a trapline before he was old enough to drive out to check it. He learned taxidermy the long way — from a mail-order manual, a great deal of trial, and more spoiled hides than he ever admitted to — and by his twenties he was mounting deer that made grown hunters go quiet. He married Carol Ann Petty in 1963 and built, behind their house on Garfield Road, the workshop where he would work nearly every day for the next sixty years.

Harvey's whitetails were legendary — museum-grade work, anatomically exact down to the set of an ear and the wet gleam of an eye, mounts that looked less made than paused. Hunters brought him their once-in-a-lifetime bucks from three states and waited a year without complaint for his hands. The Department of Natural Resources consulted him on ageing deer and reading the health of a herd, and more than one wildlife exhibit in the region wears his work without knowing his name. He could skin a fox without nicking the hide, read a fish's true colors from a fading photograph, and rebuild a mount some cheaper hand had botched into something the animal might have recognized.

He trapped muskrat, beaver, and coyote across the Manistee bottomlands his whole life, and he knew that country — its runs and dens and winter yards — as intimately as anyone alive. He was a quiet man, more at ease with the work than with the world, but generous with what he knew: he taught the craft to anyone who showed up serious, mentored a generation of young trappers, and never once turned away a kid with a road-killed something and a genuine question. He kept a chickadee that would land on his workbench and a coffee can of the exact right glass eyes for any creature you could name.

He is remembered for his hands and his patience, for six decades of coaxing a kind of stillness out of dead things that let the living remember them true, and for a craftsman's quiet faith that a thing worth doing is worth doing exactly right, however long it takes.

He is survived by his wife of sixty-two years, Carol; his children, Bruce (Tammy) Dault of Hesperia and Lori (Dan) Kiel of Ludington; four grandchildren; three great-grandchildren; and his longtime apprentice, Cody Reinhart, who will keep the workshop lights on.

He was preceded in death by his parents; his brother, Melvin; and his son, Gary, in 2004.

Flowers are welcome and can be sent to either chapel — Maple Bend Floral ((231) 555-0121) times deliveries to the visitation. More on flowers and remembrances.