Born on an Island
Long before Aix Taxidermy had a name, a studio, or a home in America, its story began in the heart of one of the world’s greatest centers of biodiversity and endemism.
Tomás and Yaira were born and raised in Cuba, the largest island in the Caribbean and home to an extraordinary diversity of animals, plants, and ecosystems. Growing up surrounded by that biological richness gave them an unusually broad exposure to the natural world from an early age.
Although their story began far from the United States, many of the birds now entrusted to Aix were already familiar to them long before they arrived here. Each year, numerous species that breed across North America migrate south through the Atlantic and Mississippi Flyways to spend part of their lives in Cuba, making the island an important wintering ground for many of the same migratory birds pursued by American sportsmen. In fact, more than 60% of the waterfowl species found across the continental United States and Canada have also been recorded in Cuba.
Long before those birds became our profession, they had already become part of our lives.
Tomás — The Bird Artist
For Tomás, it started with two fish. His father, a devoted fisherman, had preserved them himself and hung them high on the wall of their home in a small rural village in Cuba. It was the late 1980s. Tomás was five years old. Those two fish became his first understanding of what a trophy was: something brought home from the outdoors and kept, because the experience behind it mattered more than the object itself.
By the age of ten, curiosity had become experimentation. With no access to taxidermy supplies or instruction, he began preserving insects, frogs, lizards, and birds with whatever materials he could find, relying mostly on formaldehyde and instinct.
While studying veterinary medicine, he came across a pair of old taxidermy books in a local library, their pages yellowed and brittle, dating back to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, museum pieces themselves. They opened the door to an entirely different understanding of the craft. Knowledge, however, was easier to find than materials. Cuba’s decades of economic scarcity meant commercial forms, artificial eyes, and specialized tools were virtually inaccessible. So he learned to work without them: reconstructing bodies by hand with traditional wrapping methods, dried grasses and spikerushes as filling material, and glass marbles and blister packs improvised into eyes. Every specimen had to be carefully studied, measured, and sketched first, then rebuilt from its anatomy outward.
What began as necessity became an education.
Taxidermy, though, was only one part of a much deeper relationship with the natural world. Tomas went on to study biology at the University of Las Villas but did not graduate, due to ideological differences with the communist regime. He built a self-taught career as a wildlife researcher and conservationist, working at leading scientific institutions across Cuba, including the Botanical Garden of Cienfuegos (formerly the Atkins Institution of the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University at Soledad). He traveled the length of the Cuban archipelago studying animals in the field, contributed to more than a hundred scientific publications and books, including the description of over a dozen species previously unknown to science, and later worked as a scientific consultant and scriptwriter for nature documentaries. Much of that research he funded himself, earning international grants from world-leading conservation organizations, including the Rufford Foundation and the Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund, and supplementing an institutional salary that could never quite cover the cost of living by working independently as a wildlife-watching guide. Long before Aix existed, he had already learned how to build something of his own out of very little.
[Explore his scientific and conservation work → https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tomas-Rodriguez-Cabrera-2; https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomas-michel-rodriguez-cabrera].
Yaira — The Habitat Artist
In the early 1990s, around the time Tomás was beginning his first experiments with taxidermy, Yaira was growing up in the heart of Havana. Surrounded by the city, with limited access to wild places, she found herself fascinated instead by every insect, frog, lizard, and bird she encountered in the gardens and parks of her neighborhood. Plants, with their intricate flowers, leaves, shapes, and textures, seemed like puzzles waiting to be understood. Those early interests would eventually lead her toward both biology and working with her hands.
She attended the University of La Habana and graduated as a biologist, going on to work as a wildlife researcher and project manager at the Institute of Ecology and Systematics, the same institution where Tomás would later spend his final years in Cuba as a researcher. She took part in conservation projects involving endangered amphibians and reptiles, and the sensitive ecosystems they depend on.
[Explore her scientific and conservation work → https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Yaira-Lopez-Hurtado].
Yaira’s fascination with the shapes, colors, and textures of living things never faded. Her path as an artisan began after graduation, when, alongside her scientific work and as a way to make ends meet amid Cuba’s difficult economic conditions, she took a second job at an event decoration studio where everything was handcrafted. For the first time, she worked with clay, foam, textured paper, and fabric, learning to build realistic flowers, leaves, and marine forms. It was there she discovered how much she loved working with her hands to recreate the textures nature had always drawn her toward. That same instinct for texture, proportion, and natural composition is what now allows each habitat she builds to support a bird’s story, rather than simply decorate around it.
Converging Paths
Their scientific careers brought Yaira and Tomás together in Cuba: united first by a shared passion for nature, and eventually by a shared vision for a life built together.
That vision would take them far beyond the world they knew.
In the summer of 2022, after years of hoping for a way out, they left Cuba and made the journey to the United States, one that tested them in ways neither had faced before, and that marked them for the rest of their lives. When the relentless Sonoran Desert took its toll and exhaustion nearly overtook Tomás, Yaira stayed by his side until he could go on, and would not consider continuing without him. They arrived changed, but together, and their bond was stronger than ever.
They spent their first year in America rebuilding from nothing in Miami: new jobs, a first apartment, a life taking shape one step at a time. In the fall of 2023, they moved north to Connecticut.
Tomás joined an established studio in Connecticut, spending his first months in the American taxidermy trade learning it from the inside. Catching up on methods and materials entirely new to him took the better part of a year, and it was there, watching his background as a naturalist begin to translate into real skill in this craft, that he first understood how much of what he already knew would matter here.
But something in him had never really stopped pointing toward independence. Nine months in, he knew the essentials of what he had come to learn. In the summer of 2024, he left to begin working for himself, from their apartment, with no clients yet and no guarantee that any would come.
Yaira kept her full-time job so that, for a little while longer, the risk would be his alone to carry, while she dedicated her afternoons to the business’s growth, client experience, and daily operations. It didn’t stay that way for long. As the young business gained momentum, she eventually joined him full time. Her background in biology and conservation, paired with the skills she’d built working with different materials years earlier, found a natural home in the environmental side of taxidermy: recreating water, earth, vegetation, rock, and ice, the elements that turn a mounted bird into a complete scene.
Our Shared Vision
Aix Taxidermy emerged where two paths converged: two scientists, two artists, and two partners in life, bringing different strengths to a shared vision.
We did not come to this craft the way most American taxidermists do: through a lifetime of hunting and fishing first, and a talent for preserving quarry discovered along the way. We came to it through science: years spent studying how animals move, live, and belong to the landscapes around them. We see the natural world through the lens of what’s biologically accurate and at the same time beautiful to the human eye.
We believe every commission entrusted to us carries two stories. One belongs to the hunter: the people, the place, the challenges, and the memories that make the experience unforgettable. The other belongs to the bird: shaped by its evolution, anatomy, behavior, ecology, and place in the natural world. Our role is to understand how those stories meet in a single encounter, and to preserve both with equal respect, giving that shared story a physical presence worthy of being carried forward for generations.
Today, every commission benefits from our shared principles and our two complementary perspectives. Tomás focuses on the bird itself, drawing on decades of practice and years spent studying wildlife in the field. Yaira shapes the natural world around it. Every decision, from anatomy and posture to habitat and composition, is guided both by our understanding of how each species lives in the wild, and by how the hunter wishes to remember it. Together, our different strengths preserve each mount as a complete expression of two stories that become one. Every detail is considered, and every finished piece is held to a standard we are proud to put our names on.
In December 2025, Aix moved from its modest beginnings into
its current studio in Niantic, Connecticut. The surroundings have changed
considerably since those early experiments in Cuba. The principles behind the work have not.
That is what we are building at Aix: a bird-focused studio where science informs artistry, craftsmanship serves memory, and every commission is approached with the personal care and responsibility that come with being entrusted with something irreplaceable. Every commission is, above all, an act of trust, and we are privileged to honor it in every decision we make.
Why “Aix”?
Our name reflects both science and artistry. Aix honors two of the world’s most extraordinary ducks: The Wood Duck (Aix sponsa) and the Mandarin Duck (Aix galericulata). Rooted in Ancient Greek, the term originally described an unidentified diving bird noted by Aristotle. Pronounced simply as the letter X, the name carries rarity, elegance, and distinction, and the same connection between science and artistry that defines our work. Just as these ducks are admired for their beauty, every mount we create aspires to the same level of refinement.
Because it is your shot, your story, and you deserve to tell it with pride.
Thank you for taking the time to learn ours. We look forward to creating something special for you.
Tomas & Yaira
Call or Text: (860) 637-7706
Email: studio@aixtaxidermy.com