Charles H. Warner

A lean, handsome old man who looks rather like my dad with a shadowy snaggle-toothed dinosaur looming behind him, a Kansas history, and the title "Birds, Bones, and Beetles"… how could I resist that cover? This bird-watching, part-time Kansas resident who never outgrew her childhood obsession with prehistoric fauna read this captivating, award-winning biography by an admiring grandson in a day.

Author Chuck Warner was handed a small box by a curator at Kansas University's Dyche Hall Natural History Museum as part of a tour for a family reunion. In it were the field notes of his grandfather, C.D. “Bunk” Bunker, an unassuming, self-educated man who spent a decades-long career at the museum. His realms were the back rooms where specimens were prepared, mounted and cataloged; and the Kansas woods, prairies, and hills where he collected them and taught the next generation of zoologists to find, describe, and study them. Many of these young men (and they were almost all men) went on to prominent positions at the Smithsonian, New York’s American Museum of Natural History, UC Berkeley, and my beloved childhood haunt, the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History. Warner, a retired banker and businessman, with no previous writing experience beyond “a business letter,” was inspired to research and tell his grandfather’s story. And what a lovely, sprucely-written story it is.

It can be a challenge to write about a man who avoided the spotlight all his life, who was happiest puttering around with dead animals and infusing his lifetime of personally-gathered knowledge to others – a man whose formal education stopped in the 8th grade, and yet named his first daughter after a character in a poem by George Eliot (though I suspect his wife had a hand in that!). Not for him the lecture hall or speaking circuit, but rather outings with groups of select students who huddled in a rustic cabin on the weekends to find birds, mice, and turtles. His students adored him and his supportive manner – unlike today’s academics, he encouraged his students to publish, while leaving his name only on their hearts and memories, not on their articles. Their esteem is amply demonstrated by the outpouring of letters collected for an article about him in a university magazine in honor of his 65th birthday.

Warner’s research is thorough, and he weaves it with enviable skill into Bunk’s story. A little history of Bleeding Kansas here, some Civil War episodes there, the development of Kansas’s universities here… there may be a bit more of the academic squabbling (plus ça change…) than is completely engaging, but it all encircles Bunk and his own place in the environment. Bunk will forever have a place in this librarian’s heart for inventing a cataloging system for museum specimens that is the foundation for systems in museums to this day… and developing the method of using dermestid beetles to de-flesh and clean skeletons (a vast improvement over the messy, stinky process of boiling them down) which modern museums still use and like to show off on Members’ Nights. Not to mention the 45-foot-long mosasaur he discovered and personally dug out in the Gypsum Hills of western Kansas, with only his close friend and colleague, Theo Rocklund (whose own WWI story is a moving anecdote), hand tools, and a wagonful of supplies drawn by a couple of horses named Billy and Baldy. The mosasaur still has a pride of place, swimming in the air in the KU museum’s atrium.

I did have a hard time with the Alaskan expedition. Bunk accompanied a troop of wealthy trophy hunters through storms and rain and stunning landscapes, in order for the hunters to shoot as many animals as they could to decorate their homes and egos. Bunk was patronized as “the undertaker,” preparing and packing animal corpses for the museum’s collection. When the hunters gleefully shoot two adult bears but leave the abandoned cubs “because they felt sorry for them,” Bunk is said to be angry that they didn’t shoot them too for the collections… hard to say if he also might have felt the cubs were now doomed to die anyway, and more painfully. Those were the days where museums building collections did so by shooting, trapping and killing many thousands of animals. Warner gives us little sense of how Bunk might have looked at this, though it apparently troubled his daughter. Different era, different methods, different mores – yet still disturbing to a modern reader.

Warner credits his wife and daughter – teacher and writer, respectively – for coaching and input in this difficult business of writing. But anyone would be proud to have produced this engaging, personal, historical, and scientific memoir and tribute to this extraordinary and self-effacing man. Well done!… (plus d'informations)