Many people keep an extra bird or two in their freezers, just in case. Matt Klope’s freezer holds numerous birds, but his ideas on stuffing are nothing close to culinary.

Many people know Klope from his years as a wildlife biologist at Whidbey Island Naval Air Station. Today, Klope maintains an office at the base but he’s employed by the Department of the Navy as a coordinator of Bird Airstrike Hazard Assessment program which focuses on identifying and reducing bird strikes by military aircraft for the protection of human aircrews and birds. While birds capture most of his attention, Klope also trains volunteers for the Marine Mammal Stranding Network in Island County.

And he’s interested in dead things — no matter their species.

Klope operates a taxidermy business from his home north of Oak Harbor. He creates artistic mounts of waterfowl along with game birds and domestic fowl (chickens) which are exhibited at Penn Cove Pottery in San de Fuca. These engaging displays look ready to step from a cornfield or scratch around a barnyard. Klope’s study skins and mounts receive no less painstaking care but when finished are ready to survive years of handling at hands-on science centers and in local schools where Klope delivers programs on environment and wildlife.

Klope explains how a bird’s structure relates to its life. He said people may see a bird many times but not think much about it’s life.

“In a class, I’ll point out wing shapes, the feet, the beak and show kids how that bird moves, how it catches food and where it fits in the environment. Kids learn more when they can touch something,” Klope said.

Uncountable kids remember his mantra — “science stinks” — years after Klope visited their classroom.

“If it’s not smelly, it’s not science,” he said, pointing out that while rot and decay may be end products of life, these same processes provide other life with nutrition and enriches soil.

Probably the stinkiest job Klope has worked on was the decomposing carcas of a gray whale that washed up on a Greenbank beach in 1999. Klope has permits to collect specimens so he organized WSU Beach Watchers in a long process of exposing the skeleton and preparing it for display. Today, “Rosie’s” skeleton hangs in the Coupeville Wharf.

Klope’s freezer contains a variety of carcasses including a sea turtle, harbor porpoise calf and numerous avians from raptors to robins. The sea turtle will be mounted for a science center on the Pacific coast. The harbor porpoise washed up on West Beach and was picked up for study by a Seattle scientist. Some waterfowl Klope will mount for customers but most of the birds will be sent to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

There, the skins will be part of collections at the National Museum of Natural History.

Klope sends birds to D.C. year round as the Smithsonian works to maintain a representation of birds from all areas of the country, collected at all times of the year to show as many variations as possible.

“The museum likes to get as many birds as it can,” Klope said. He’s happy to oblige. Somewhere in the museum’s vast holdings are birds tagged with the name of the island resident who found the bird carcas and brought it to Klope.

“I just prepare and ship the birds,” Klope said. “But I didn’t find all of them. Other people did.”

Klope also gathers owl pellets, dehydrates and packages them to be dissected at science centers. Each rough, grayish-brown oval of upchucked excrement contains the bones and some skin of an owl’s meal — usually a mouse or a vole.

Klope searches prime owl habitat, woods near a field, for the regurgitated nuggets and sells each pellet for about $1.

“I run a business built on barf,” he said. And it’s not a small business — Klope plans on funding college tuition for three children with his pellet proceeds.

Klope believes small details, like owl pellets or perfecting the sheen on a rooster’s feathers, enriches life.

“We live in an incredibly beautiful place,” he said. “But we must stop and look around to see all the beauty.”