University of Dallas News

Issue date: 2/23/10 Section: News

Media Credit: Dr. Marcy Brown Marsden Warren Pulich hand stuffed the birds in the University's teaching collection with cotton in Carpenter Hall.

If you poke around in the storage room of the ecology research lab, you might catch a whiff of the strong scent of mothballs. And if you follow your nose, you will find a row of wooden storage units that open to reveal drawers filled with about 400 birds lying on their backs, neatly sorted and catalogued with handwritten tags. Hummingbirds, mockingbirds, blue jays and a heron are among the inhabitants of these storage units that make up the University of Dallas stuffed bird collection.

The skins, as biology department chair Dr. Marcy Brown Marsden referred to them, have value as classroom tools. Brown uses them as visual aids in her classes, such as Ornithology and Darwin. Some of the birds, like the heron and gull, are the only ones of their kind in the collection. There are also multiple examples of other birds such as woodpeckers or the beautifully colored painted buntings, which allow students to see natural variations among a given species.

In addition to their natural history educational value, the specimens provide a link to UD's own history. The collection was donated to the University by former biology professor and avid ornithologist Warren Pulich, who stuffed the birds himself. Most of the birds were found dead, or had been sick at animal shelters before they came to Pulich. Many people gave him birds, including Brown, who gave Pulich a gull that is part of the collection.

Brown said Pulich stuffed the birds by hand using cotton, which created some problems since he worked out of Carpenter Hall, where science classes were held before the construction of the Haggerty Science Building.

The bird collection now housed in the Science Building is only a small percentage of the birds that Pulich amassed over the years. Brown said that about 3,000 other skins from the collection were donated to the Western Foundation for Vertebrate Zoology in California.

Pulich began teaching Anatomy and Developmental Biology to nursing students from the university's inception, said Brown, who first became acquainted with him as her anatomy instructor. Birds, however, were his passion.

Brown said that Pulich was completely engaged by birds. She said it was not uncommon on field trips for a bird flying overhead to distract Pulich from driving as he tried to identify the bird. Pulich's special interest was the golden-cheeked warbler, an endangered species native to Texas, although he also spent time working in American Samoa.

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