Bill Stewart - The patience of a saint

If you asked Bill Stewart several decades ago what he’d be working on at age 81, it’s unlikely that he would have guessed “reconstructing marine mammal skeletons.”

But that’s what happened.

Trained as an architect, Bill has a keen eye and sense of how things should fit together. It all comes in handy when he has to take a box full of bones and turn them into a skeleton. Even more remarkable, he offers his services for free. Bill’s been donating his time and expertise to Harbor Branch for about 12-years. “I’m not really sure,” he admits, “but something like that anyway.”

He started out working with living dolphins, monitoring their movements and later working in the animal husbandry department, cooking up “baby foods” for sick and stranded animals undergoing rehabilitation.

Today, Bill is Harbor Branch’s “bone man,” who along with fellow volunteer Nat Huggins, also 81, is putting together (the fancy word is “articulating”) the skeleton of a very large manatee, who when alive, was called Hurricane.

Hurricane was a manatee who died during a Florida cold spell; his body was necropsied (an animal autopsy) with respect, then buried and later the bones were excavated to be used as a teaching tool around the state.

“We’re holding our breath that all the bones are still here,” says Bill, worried that one or two may have been permanently “borrowed” during Hurricane’s tour of the state.”

While Hurricane is Bill’s first manatee, he’s no stranger to skeletal articulation, having assembled all the marine mammals now displayed at the Ocean Discovery Center, including an Atlantic spotted dolphin, a melon-headed whale, a sea otter and even a wolf.

His most famous specimen is C-6, an elderly bottle-nosed dolphin that was seriously injured by bull sharks, cared for and rehabbed at Harbor Branch, and released only to die several months later from choking on a fish.

When asked how he got started doing this painstaking but critically important work, Bill modestly replied, “No one else wanted to do the job.”

He predicts it will take about six-months to complete the project, as the time he can devote to it is limited.

While this is Nat’s first venture into skeletal articulation, Bill is confident that Nat’s engineering and art background will be a definite asset to the project. His experience includes 19-years with the electric company, installing manatee protection devices. He’s also a talented model maker and some of his work modeling submarines and submersibles can be seen around campus.

When asked what qualities are important for doing this job right, Bill says, “Well, I guess patience is the first thing. It takes a lot of patience. And some imagination, I think. You have to have a vision.”

“And a few martinis at night,” adds Nat.

-- Submitted by Diane Morgan