Career Tech students construct ‘Wood Bison in a Box’ kit

WASILLA — Just when you thought you’d heard every variation of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” enter Tim Lundt.

Since 2003, he’s made a name for himself in the Mat-Su Borough School District and across the state as that bone guy. He’s made 10 kits total, including two articulated moose kits, two bears, two wolves, a lynx. And now, students in his Alaska Wildlife class at Mat-Su Career and Technical High School have completed a pair of wood bison skeleton kits that other students will be able to borrow and use to learn about anatomy, Lundt said.

The kits come in neatly labeled wooden crates — Moose in a Box, Wolf in a Box, Bear in a Box — and a manual illustrated by Lee Post that shows each bone and includes details directions for how to assemble each kit.

All of the skeletons also have specially fabricated metal frames that students assemble first before adding the bones. Lundt said he’s used the same welder for all of them, Jim Egger who owns Aeroquest Machining in the Butte.

Frontiersman readers know Egger as the Butte astrophotographer who regularly shares his space photos with Frontiersman readers, and who build the telescope in the observatory at Mat-Su Career Tech.

Since Lundt received the initial grant for $10,000 to build two moose, two bear and two wolves, Lundt estimated that more than 1,000 students from Wasilla High, Colony High and Palmer High schools’ anatomy classes have assembled the kits.

And it’s not just high school students who use the kits. Lundt said Butte Elementary checks out the black bear kit every year. Some home school groups have also contacted Lundt to checkout a kit. Everyone is welcome to contact him and checkout one of the kits.

Although Lundt’s classroom has a pair of marine otter skeleton’s, too, they are set up as a display in the classroom and not designed as a kit that can be checkout and assembled.

All of these skeletons have stories, the black bears that were killed in traffic and Romeo and Juliet Wolf.

The wolves are a favorite among Lundt’s macabre menagerie.

When they were among the living, he said the male was the alpha wolf. Trouble came for the pack when they all ended up caught in a trapper’s snares. Romeo survived by chewing his leg free.

The leg healed, a chunk of bone grew back and the dominate male found a new lady love to start a new pack, Lundt said.

Their tale turned tragic when a trapper shot and killed the two a short time later.

“The male and female are still together — but in our skeleton kits,” Lundt said, April 22.

He also works as the education coordinator for the Moose Federation. Lundt said when he heard about Fish and Game’s plans to cull a couple of bulls from the herd at Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center to diversify the breeding stock, he began to hatch a plan to acquire the skeletons and add them to his articulated animal farm.

When students in Lundt’s science class and those in Chef Carolyn Frey’s culinary arts class arrived in Portage that day, Alaska Fish and Game employees had already killed the two males and had them hanging to butcher, Lundt said.

“It’s a lot of hands-on stuff and that’s what they like,” he said.

The experience was especially memorable for junior Kierra Clement who had just moved back to Alaska from Chicago a few days earlier.

She had no appropriate winter clothes for the trip, so her mom bought gear so she could participate. Clement said when she got home the clothes were so bloody her mom tossed the whole lot.

“I was red everywhere,” she said.

Clement said it took a few days and lots of scrubbing to clean the bloodstains from her hands and arms.

The class made jerky from some of the bison meat they were given and Chef Frey’s students prepared a meal for the science class from another portion. Clement had none.

“All I could see was the face,” she said.

There’s an interesting story there, too, Lundt said.

When they didn’t have room in the freezer to store the skulls until they could be boiled, Lundt came up with another plan. He took meaty skulls to a friend with domestic beetles. The skulls were placed in containers with the beetles and the handy bugs did the rest.

The result Lundt said was that some soft tissue in the bison’s nasal cavities were preserved, which would have been destroyed by boiling the skulls clean.

To checkout a kit, contact Lundt at 352-0433, or Timothy.Lundt@matsuk12.us

Contact Heather A. Resz at 352-2268 or heather.resz@frontiersman.com.