If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Mother Nature must blush every time she sees something made by Swans Island resident Gary Hoyle.

He creates amazingly realistic imitations of the natural world for dioramas and other museum exhibits – from tiny leaves and berries to frogs, seals and moose.

Mr. Hoyle was the curator of natural history and the exhibits artist at the Maine State Museum in Augusta from 1973 to 2001. He also led a 100-member team that excavated the first wooly mammoth bones found in Maine.

For the past 10 years, Mr. Hoyle has worked as a freelance consultant, providing exhibit design, fabrication and reconstruction services to museums around the country. His clients have included the Field Museum in Chicago, the Museum of Natural History in Minneapolis, the Billings Farm Museum in Woodstock, Vt., the Weather Discovery Center in North Conway, N.H, and Dow Corning Corporation.

Mr. Hoyle grew up in Gardiner. Like many children, he loved to draw, but he also created small three-dimensional scenes using modeling clay and other materials. When he was 12, his grandfather took him to the Museum of Science in Boston.

“It was the first time I had seen dioramas, and I was just bowled over,” he said.

Two years later, he was invited to the Maine State Museum to meet an exhibits specialist named Klir Beck.

“The museum had been closed for several years, and he was trying to resurrect it,” Mr. Hoyle said. “I was invited to come and watch him build models for a diorama, a bear scene. It was really something to see how he fabricated all the different things.”

The young Mr. Hoyle was already pretty good at creating animal models, particularly turtles, and Mr. Beck asked if he would like to make a couple of turtles for one of the exhibits he was working on at the museum.

“I got all excited and spent months working on them,” he said.

A number of years later, when he started working at the Maine State  Museum, one of his first tasks was to dismantle an exhibit in the old capitol building because the space was needed for something else.

“The irony was that it was the exhibit with my turtles in it,” he said. “They were pretty much falling apart by then.”

Mr. Hoyle majored in zoology at the University of Maine. Later, he studied with Fred Scherer, an exhibit designer and fabricator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. An accomplished muralist, Mr. Scherer taught Mr. Hoyle to paint realistic backgrounds for his dioramas.

Since Mr. Hoyle and his wife, Jeanne, moved from their long-time home in Pittston to Swans Island five years ago, he has taken up oil painting. Landscapes inspired by his island surroundings line the walls of his home studio.

Several years ago, Mr. Hoyle began creating whimsical color illustrations based on the premise that dinosaurs not only survived to modern times but had been domesticated. Mr. Hoyle is looking for a publisher for what he calls his “dino-fantasy” illustrations.

Meanwhile, he stays busy making things like cranberry plants – complete with fruit, stems and leaves – for museum exhibits. All it takes is paper, wax, cotton, wire, twine, wood shavings, plastic – and an incredible amount of talent and patience.

Even Mother Nature has to be impressed.

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