[mou] John Jarosz, birder behind the scenes

[Jim Williams]

John Jarosz died a few days ago. The  name might not be familiar, but if you have visited the Bell Museum of Natural History, you are familiar with his work. John, a resident of Brooklyn Center who lived to be age 92, was a noted wildlife artist and chief curator of exhibits at the museum for 33 years. He also was a wood carver of extraordinary talent. In 1995 I was privileged to visit with John one afternoon. 
This story was drawn from that interview. It first appeared in the MOU newsletter in November 1995. — Jim Williams

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It all began when John Jarosz shot a duck near a private hunting preserve belonging to the King of England. The King has nothing more to do with this story, but the duck does.

John began his working career as a barber, learning that trade at age 16. Later, he was a steeplejack. He entered the Army in 1942, training as a combat engineer. He spent his war years building air bases in England.

That is where he shot the duck, a black and white bird with reddish feet, a Shelldrake. “It was a gorgeous bird,” he told me. “I decided to preserve the specimen.” He had learned taxidermy as a youngster. The duck was prepped with a pocket knife, gasoline used to clean the skin. 

John wrapped his finished bird and sent it home. Custom officials confiscated the package. Possession of the mounted duck was illegal, his parents were told. Destroy it or give it to a museum.

His parents called Dr. T.S. Roberts at the University of Minnesota Museum of Natural History. He accepted the Shelldrake, and he was so impressed with the taxidermy work that he asked to visit with John when his Army duty was finished.

And that is how John became preparator, curator, and taxidermist for the Bell museum.

If you have visited the museum and toured its quiet, darkened halls, standing before those windows that open upon so many different Minnesota landscapes, you have seen much of what John created during his university tenure.

Many of the dioramas at the museum contain his taxidermy work, and show his skill at recreating the environment in which the plants and animals on display once lived. He could show you how to create a tree or fashion leaves and flowers from wax. He could make a rock so real you almost could hear the click of wolves’ claws as they walked across it, make mud that looked as sticky as the real thing.

John and his coworkers labored as long as two years to create one of those large displays.

In his retirement years, John pointed those skills at much smaller targets. In the neat living room of John and wife Margie in the fall of 1995, inside a lighted display case, were a Passsenger Pigeon, a Great Auk, a Carolina Parakeet, an Ivory-billed Woodpecker, and a handful of other birds and mammals.

Handful is the key word. The birds could perch on your index finger. You could hold a flock of them in one hand. These were tiny, perfectly formed miniatures carved and painted by John. He fashioned more than 500 of these delicate works of art.

MOU member Bob Janssen has a set of all of the Minnesota warblers, regular and casual, carved by John. His first carving for Bob was a Henslow’s Sparrow, fashioned in the year following his retirement. In 2003, Bob received his last Jarosz carvings, two woodpeckers. 

Most of his carvings were of birds. “They were my first love,” he told me. “What would we do without our feathered friends?”