Charmion McKusick grew up in Waukegan, Illinois, sailing on Lake Michigan. Her ambition was to study physical anthropology, which brought her to the University of Arizona in Tucson in September of 1949. During a summer at Point of Pines Field School in 1952, she found bird and animal bones far more interesting than human bones. Her training in bird bones came while serving as a laboratory assistant to Dr. Lyndon Lane Hargrave. Charmion's tenure at the Southwest Archeological Center included training in mammal bone identification under Thomas W. Mathews. She has identified faunal specimens from the greater Southwest and Mexico, and has special interests in Indian Domestic Turkey breeds, Mexican macaws, birds of sacrifice, iconography, and the Upland Salado people. Charmion is also the author of "Evidences of Hereditary High Status at Gila Pueblo" (1992), in Proceedings of the Second Salado Conference, Globe, AZ 1992, an occasional paper of the Phoenix Chapter of the Arizona Archaeological Society; The Gila Pueblo Salado (1997), an Arizona Archaeological Society publication co-authored with Jon Young; Southwest Birds of Sacrifice, Arizona Archaeologist No. 31 (2001); and "Upland Salado Resource Use" in the festschrift Explorations in Ethnobiology: The Legacy of Amadeo Rea, edited by Marsha Quinlan and Dana Lepofsky from the Society of Ethnobiology, University of North Texas, Denton (2013).