Shortly after graduating from Harvard, Burden went to the Far East on an expedition to bring back specimens for the American Museum of Natural History which led to the establishment of the Department of Animal Behavior in 1928. He was elected to the Board of Trustees of the museum in 1926. He led expeditions to various tropical islands and the Arctic, but his most well known expedition was to the Island of Komodo in the Dutch East Indies in 1926. Along with his first wife Catherine and their party, he went looking for Varanus komodoensis, a direct descendant of the dinosaur which today is better known as the Komodo dragon. By using sapling traps baited with buffalo meat, Burden was the first "white man" to find and trap the giant lizards who weighed 350 pounds and were approximately 10 feet long. They also collected 3,000 insect and amphibian specimens. Of the three they captured, two of the Komodo dragons were given to the Bronx Zoo, but died soon thereafter and were mounted in the new Hall of Reptiles and Amphibians at the museum. In 1930, he co-wrote and produced, with William Chanler as part of Burden-Chanler Productions, the silent film entitled The Silent Enemy starring Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance. Along with Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, Sherman Pratt, and Ilya Andreyevich Tolstoy, Burden founded and served as president of Marineland, one of Florida's first marine mammal parks in St. Augustine, Florida in 1938. The park was conceived as an oceanarium that could be used to film marine life. During World War II, he developed a shark repellent for the U.S. Navy.
Published works
In 1927, he wrote a book about the expedition to Komodo Island entitled The Dragon Lizards of Komodo. Burden's chapter "The Komodo Dragon", in his book, Look to the Wilderness, published in 1956, describes the expedition, the habitat, and the behavior of the dragon. In 1960, Burden wrote Book to the Wilderness.
Personal life
Burden was married three times with his first and second ending in divorce. His first marriage was to Katherine Curtin White, a daughter of Ernest Ingersol White and Katharine Curtin White, in 1924. Her uncle, Horace White, had been Governor of New York in 1910. Before their divorce, they lived at East 72nd Street in Manhattan and were the parents of:
Katharine Sage "Wendy" Burden, who married Walter Denegre Sohier. They divorced and she married the journalist Edward P. Morgan.
William Douglas Burden Jr., who was one of America's top ski racers, competing internationally, until a near-fatal ski racing accident in Italy in 1954 ended his career. His life partner was Marilyn Hodges Wilmerding.
Andrew White Burden, who married Meta Craig Paumgarten, a daughter of Harald Paumgarten, in 1962. His wife died in a tragic avalanche on the back of Ajax in 1972.
After their divorce, Katherine married Dan Platt Caulkins in 1939. He married secondly to Elizabeth Gammack in 1940. Elizabeth was a daughter of Malcolm Greene Chace and the former wife of Thomas Hubbard Gammack. Before their divorce, they were the parents of one son, Christopher Burden. After their divorce, Elizabeth married Grenville Temple Emmet in 1973. His third, and final, marriage was in 1971 to Jeanne Wells Booth. Jeanne, the former wife of John Welles Booth, was a daughter of George Houghton Wight and Vida Wight. Burden died in Charlotte, Vermont on November 14, 1978. He was buried at Grand View Cemetery in Chittenden County, Vermont. After his death, his widow remarried to Dunbar Bostwick in 1983. Bostwick was the widower of Burden's cousin, Electra Webb.
