I do a lot of things that most people would probably consider gross during the course of my work. As a kid, I was very squeamish, but within the context of doing taxidermy and stuff, I got pretty used to it. Nothing really weirds me out.
People frequently bring me dead animals – occasionally, they bring me live ones, too. One time, I came back to my desk and found a Starbucks cup with a live bat in it. No note, nothing. Two students had discovered it on the ground by Building 9, being mobbed by magpies, so they put it in the cup – the only thing they had with them to carry it – and thought, “Dana will know what to do.”
I called the wildlife rescue, and they said if the bat didn’t look hurt, to just give it a little bit of time to recover and then let it go. I took it out by Building 5 a little later and it climbed right out of that cup.
A big part of Dana Sanderson’s job is creating taxidermy and skeletal mounts to provide real-life examples of what students are learning in class. Sanderson has a wildlife permit that allows him to collect animals he comes across that are already dead – roadkill, birds that hit windows or animals that died of natural causes. He catalogues them to report them to Fish and Wildlife, uses a colony of flesh-eating beetles in the lab to clean away the tissue and reassembles the bones for educational purposes.
His favourite piece so far is a great horned owl skeletal mount.
“When you see a bird, it looks really big, but its skeleton is tiny,” says Sanderson. “For this piece, we pulled off each individual feather, pinned them to a board in order and then cleaned off the skeleton. I had to glue each feather back on individually with a little piece of wire drilled into the bone. It was a lot of work, but it turned out really cool.”
I get to build some good relationships and rapport with students, I think, because I am so willing to just go off on a tangent and talk about weird things. When I was a student at MacEwan, it was smaller and I always try to give students that same “small university” experience that I had. I think it's important for us to be passionate about what we're doing and for students to see that we care because they're going to get more out of it if they care too.
The zoology stuff is inherently accessible and interesting – we all have that little part of our brain that's interested in animals. I'm only one member of a seven-person team, and the other lab techs do more of the important, serious work of running our molecular biology labs – the day-to-day, regimented work. They don't get to do as much of the fun, “flashy,” animal stuff as I do. I'm very fortunate in that regard.
– Dana Sanderson, Bachelor of Science ’14, Laboratory Technician in the Department of Biological Sciences
This story is part of our Portraits of MacEwan series that highlights some of the many people who work at MacEwan and the diverse ways they support students.
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