Carving Out a Talent

When Burney Tompkins faced a career change, he had no idea that it would lead him into a promising avocation bird carving. It was just before Christmas and not a good time to be changing jobs. Burney, who lived in Florida at the time, was selling medical lab supplies. When he came to work one morning, he discovered that major changes had taken place in the company; they were now going to sell oncology research materials. I felt as if I needed a better background to sell those highly technical pieces of equipment, Burney says as he remembers that day. So I decided to look for another job.

But what am I going to do for Christmas presents with the holidays coming on so soon? he asked himself realizing money would be in short supply. It was at that point he decided to try his hand at carving. I had been painting on canvas for years and always tried to make my subjects look three-dimensional and as lifelike as possible.

Carving seemed to be the logical next step; he could make things really three-dimensional. What to carve was no question since Burney had long been interested in all aspects of nature. I’ve spent most of my life in nature. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent in the natural history museum, at the University of Florida, watching the lab workers prepare birds for the exhibits. I used to go in there and draw birds for hours.

Walking around the Tompkins’ home today, you certainly see they have a love for nature. Several terrariums house Burney’s frogs and toads while various bird and fish carvings adorn the walls.

I made all my Christmas presents that year, remembers the salesman turned home care nurse via a number of career changes since 1979. And it sort of became traditional from then on for me to make gifts for everyone.

The first Christmas present he made that year was a laughing gull. He took a round disc of plywood and painted a seascape on it; then he carved a flying gull and positioned it as if it were flying toward the viewer out of the picture. I put a piece of rope around the edge of the disk to finish it. It was quite attractive, and when I saw one of those first carvings a couple years ago, it still looked pretty good.

Another thing I did that first year was a big moth. I covered another plywood disk with punk bark (punk is an exotic tree in Florida with bark that peels off in big pieces); then I cut out some wings and made an atlas moth. I painted it and put it on that punk bark background. I also did a cecropia moth that way. About 15 or 20 years later I was in Texas visiting one of my friends, and I saw a moth carving in her house. I said, Where’d you get the carving? That’s really neat. She said, What are you talking about? Look on the back. My name was on the back; I had forgotten all about having done that for her.

Tompkins started selling birds a year or two after he made those first Christmas presents, but his carvings have changed over the years. I made a lot of one-third sized birds back then several water turkeys (anhingas), great blue herons, and a lot of pelicans. Oh, everybody wanted pelicans! Currently he does life-sized birds and fish almost exclusively.

A lady came to me and said, ‘My husband is crazy over pelicans. Is there any way you can carve me a big pelican?’ I said, ‘How big?’

The biggest piece of wood you can find, she said. A few days later one of Burney’s customers cut down a big oak so Burney got a hefty chunk of that wood. It must have been close to four feet high; it was so big I could hardly get it into the trunk of my car. When I got it home and put it in my front yard, I took my chain saw and started carving away. It took me three days to carve that bird, but it turned out pretty good. I did the whole thing with the chain saw except for the finishing I sanded it nice and smooth and stained it.

Burney’s carvings look so lifelike that some people think they are real creatures. The other day I took a bass into Dr. Winter’s office to show him; he likes to fish, you know. One of the nurses said to me, ‘Where’d you catch that one?’

Burney likes to carve birds and other animals so people can see some of God’s creatures up close and with a fresh perspective. People know birds by pictures they’ve seen. But when you let them hold a carving, they will say, ‘Wow, I didn’t know it was like this!’

See this evening grosbeak? Burney asks, handing me a carving. It was one of the first birds I carved after coming to Tennessee. I had never seen an evening grosbeak before. Notice that the legs are just pieces of wire. Now he buys the legs he puts on his birds. They’re made of pewter, which is soft enough to bend the way the artist wants, although pre-made legs can be bought specifically for most types of birds.

See that brown hrasher? he asks, pointing out a bird on the wall. They didn’t have brown thrasher legs so I got robin legs instead; they are about the same size.

What about eyes? I used to make my own eyes by painting the end of a dowel black. I would put a drop of white or yellow paint in the very center of the dowel end and then cut off a thin section. Now I buy glass eyes designed for taxidermy work. Like legs, eyes are available for just about any kind of bird.

How does he get the sizes and proportions so accurate that the female killdeer almost appears alive? When I find a dead bird, I pick it up and hold it in my hands. That way I get to know what a bird feels like. I also make three measurements the length of the tail from tip to base, the length of the back from the base of the tail to the crown of the head, and length of the head from the back of the head to tip of the bill. Some of his measurements come from birds that he has measured while he was assisting ornithologists who were catching birds in mist nets for banding studies. If he wants to carve a bird he has never found dead or in a mist net, he goes to a museum and measures one of its birds.

Using a band saw, Burney follows the measurements of the dead bird and cuts out a rough bird shape from a chunk of wood. He next goes to his sanding disk a tool that he designed himself. It is a wooden circle about eight inches in diameter covered with very coarse sandpaper and mounted on a grinding wheel. After a session on the sanding wheel, the carving has most of the wood sanded off that is coming off.

Next he uses the hand-held power carver to get finer details worked into the wood. Every once in a while when I’m carving, I just stop and hold the bird in my hand, Burney says. I can tell if something is wrong. It’s too fat in the chest, or the breast bone is too big. After I netted a few birds and held them in my hands, I got a feel for size, proportion, and what a bird should feel like. This is where many people are denied the blessings that God intended. Because of sin, fear was placed between man and animals, and it is uncommon to get familiar with many of God’s creatures.

To obtain the tiny details (like feathers), Burney either carves them with a sharp knife or burns them with a fine-tipped wood burning tool. Last comes the rather intricate painting and then the delicate mounting.

Burney has also made quite a few decoys. Many people like to have a duck decoy around to enjoy. When I was doing decoys, I came up with the idea of that sanding disk I have in my shop. A fellow came here once who was traveling all around the states in a van carving decoys. I said to him, ‘I’d like to see how you do it.’ Out of the back of his van he pulled a big bench and a wooden vise and sat down there with his pull knife and started to carve the decoy. I said, ‘Why in the world are you spending so much time doing that?’ He said, ‘There’s no other way to do it; you can’t get the wood off any faster.’

I said, ‘Come into my shop a minute, and let me show you something.’ I had a piece of wood all ready to start making a bufflehead duck. I put that wood up to the sanding disk, and his eyes got big as he watched the sawdust pile up on the floor. He said, ‘I know what I am going to get me.’ And sure enough, the next time I saw him, he had made himself a sanding disk.

Another tool Burney designed is his air-filtering system. When you walk into his shop on a cool winter evening and see the fan running, you wonder about it. Oh, that’s my air filtering system, Burney explains with a grin. There’s an air conditioner filter taped over the fan which is blowing away from the work area. Burney picks up the blue gill fish he’s working on and turns on his power carver. As the head whirls and the fine dust comes off, it is sucked straight into the filter. I take it outside every few hours and tap the dust off it. This saves me from having to wear a dust mask.

In addition to carving realistic birds and fish, Burney makes props to fit each bird. The meadowlark sits on a simulated fence post complete with barbed wire, and the killdeer female is doing her broken-wing act near a ground nest with a baby inside. Burney makes these props from things he finds. I pick up all kinds of things when I’m outside, he comments. I gather a lot of driftwood at the beach and on rivers. He watches even in places where you wouldn’t expect to find anything natural. Look at this dried mushroom I got at a flea market. You don’t usually find dried ones in the woods that are nearly that good, Burney explains, noting the mushroom will go well with a wood thrush or towhee carving. I like something that has a lot of character.

In addition to birds and fish, Burney also makes butterflies since they are an elusive creature and difficult for people to get close to. When he did his first butterflies, they had wooden wings. Now he makes the bodies of wood and the wings of thin plastic. I just touch the plastic with fine sandpaper to give it a bit of texture, he offers.

What effect has carving had on Burney’s life? The carvings and my frogs have gotten me into places where I could never have gone otherwise, he explains (Burney is an expert on amphibians of all sorts). When the Tennessee Aquarium was first being developed, they called me and wanted to know if I could give them any suggestions where to get frogs and salamanders. So I went out collecting with them, and now I frequently visit the aquarium. At many of the bird sanctuaries and science museums in Florida, I just walk in, and I know everybody. My love of nature has really blossomed in terms of helping me meet people with like interests.

Selling his carvings is not hard, and sometimes he sells when he isn’t even trying. Before he started in home health care, Burney worked at a hospital in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Some of his fellow nurses heard that he carved, and they said, Why don’t you bring a carving so we can all see it? When he took a fish he had just finished, one of the first people to see it was a doctor. He said, Whose is this? His next question was, How much do you want for it?

I don’t know, replied the carver. I never thought about selling it.

Well, give me a price, the doctor said, and he bought it on the spot.

People who buy his carvings usually know that Burney is a Christian. They know that it is the love of God’s Creation that makes me carve things. I tell people that the Lord has given me the feel for doing things like this, and He could take it away any time. In the process I am able to point them to the God of Creation.

Burney also feels he has seen the promises of God fulfilled toward his family. God has promised us, ‘. . . and try Me now in this . . . If I will not open for you the windows of heaven and pour out for you such blessings that there will not be room enough to receive it’ (Malachi 3:10). He chuckles, Maybe I haven’t quite reached that point yet, but we have never gone hungry. And there have been times when we did not have a buck in the bank. Then I would go carve two or three little things, and somebody would come by and buy them. Or maybe I’d run into one of my customers, and they’d ask me if I had anything for sale. Once when we were flat busted, I came home with almost three hundred dollars. It brought tears to my eyes as we sat there and counted that money.

Burney doesn’t mind working for what he gets either. I always figure that God tells us He will take care of the birds, he says. Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? (Matthew 6:26). But the birds don’t just sit there on the limb and wait for God to drop the food into their mouths. They go out and look for it. In the dead of winter, they’re out there scraping around in the snow looking for food. I always figure I’m no better than they are so I’ve rooted for mine, too. And by having to put out carvings, I have gotten better at it.

When asked how many carvings he has done in the past 18 years, Burney, pauses, I really don’t know. Those first few years, I probably did a couple hundred miniature ones, and I’d sell those for $40 or $50. The bigger they got, the fewer I did. But there have been a lot of them.

Not all of Burney’s carvings come out exactly right. He had one bad experience when he didn’t measure carefully. See this one I made? It was a strange thing; I carved this bird, and then I couldn’t come up with what it was. I started out wanting it to be a black-necked stilt. I got it all carved and pretty much done except the paint; then I took a birding trip to Texas. I was in a bird blind with my camera and a black-necked stilt came walking by about 10 feet from me. I couldn’t believe what I saw. The bird was about half the size of what I had carved. Later, an ornithology teacher came over, and we went all through the bird book trying to find something else we could make it into, but we never could find one that was quite right. So there it sits unfinished with no name and no identity.

Burney finds that he can’t carve just anything someone might ask for. One fellow wants a pair of hummingbirds. But I can’t do it right now. I have to be in the mood. If I’m not in the right mood, they could pay me $1,000, and I could not do it. Money is not the motivation. If I’m not in the mood for it, I can’t give the carving that twinkle in the eye that makes it look as if the bird is just ready to fly off, or the fish is ready to swim away.

So what motivates him to keep on carving? The same thing that got him started in the first place the love of wild things and a desire to share God’s Creation with others. Burney, like the Psalmist, enjoys studying, Where the birds make their nests; the stork has her home in the fir trees (Psalm 104:17).

Around the holiday season one year, a doctor ordered a carved fish. Burney was tired from rushing a few other special requests, and he didn’t feel right about carving any more fish right then. He explained to man that it would be a month or two before he could get it done since he didn’t feel inspired at the moment. The doctor replied, I want one of your fish you are inspired to do, not one you had to do. Then he added, I’ll pray you will get inspired soon.

David Ekkens, Ph.D., writes from Tennessee where he is a biology professor at a Christian college teaching young people about the Creator’s handiwork.