Vanguard of
the Volunteers
An Eye-Opening Educator
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© Susan Salinger
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"Look, look up there!" says seven-year-old Franciny Rochet, pointing to a dark shape flitting through the trees in New York City's Morningside Park. The second grader smiles and turns to five of her classmates and their trip leader, Wendy Paulson. The kids breathlessly identify the crow, and after a few excited minutes, Paulson gathers their attention and crouches over her scuffed hiking shoes. "Look everywhere," she whispers. "Look on the ground, look up in the sky." And with that, the fledgling birders are off, racing toward a squirrel on a rock, scanning the skies, and poking leaves with sticks. Paulson watches over the action with the serene calm befitting someone who has been leading children on nature hikes for 30 years.
A volunteer teacher in Audubon New York's For the Birds program, Paulson teaches in six Harlem elementary-school classes that periodically take kids from the concrete jungle to the woody environs of Manhattan's majestic city parks. The program introduces basic ecological concepts to young urban schoolchildren through the discovery of birds.
For Paulson, who helped develop the program in 1997, this is but one of a long string of volunteer activities that exemplify her long-term commitment to environmental education and conservation. During the 1980s and 1990s she participated in breeding-bird surveys for Audubon Illinois, and she has been an active participant in the Christmas Bird Count for the past 15 years. In Barrington, the Chicago suburb where she lived for 21 years before moving to Manhattan in 1996, Paulson directed the education program of Citizens for Conservation, a volunteer program in which she taught ecology classes to area schoolchildren and developed a series of nature booklets for children. During this time, she also led public walks through many of the Chicago area's forest preserves.
"There's hardly a thing you can name that she wasn't active in," says Chuck Westcott, a 25-year member of Prairie Woods Audubon and the former director of the Crabtree Nature Center, in Barrington. "I don't think there's a schoolchild in the area who wouldn't recognize her and want her to teach a class or lead a field trip."
Back in Morningside Park, not far
from Paulson's home on Manhattan's Upper West Side, the students spy a
bird's nest high in the trees and rush to tell Paulson of their discovery.
"New York City is a great place to learn about birds," says
Paulson. "There are always surprises, like the kestrel and the hermit
thrushes we saw this morning." Her goal is to help young children
see the wildlife all around them and appreciate nature everywhere. "I
hope to open their eyes to the rich, diverse natural world that's out
there," she says, "and the birds are an entry point into that
world. It's easier to care about things if you see them and you know about
them." --Ryan George Randall Davey
Audubon Center "I
know!" "I know!" The voices of the fifth graders at Agua
Fria Elementary School, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, overlap one another,
and the kids' hands wave eagerly in the air. Lauren Parmelee, director of education
for Audubon-New Mexico, stands at the front of the airy classroom at the
Randall Davey Audubon Center, casual in jeans, her wavy brown hair loose
around her shoulders. She holds a coyote skull in her hands. "The most important thing about
being a scientist," Parmelee tells the class, "is asking questions.
You have nothing to study if you don't have questions. The best ones are
questions you think of yourself." The 24 kids jockeying for her attention
are in their second day of the center's weeklong Outdoor Science Field
Studies program, which is led by Parmelee, education specialist Jessica
Lagalo, and education assistant Margot Shapiro. Today the students are
practicing observation and classification by comparing the ecosystems
of their schoolyard in the dusty, high-desert town of Santa Fe to the
ecosystems of the Audubon center, tucked in a valley in the Santa Fe foothills
of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. That these fifth graders are here
at all is something of a miracle. In their school district, literacy and
basic skills are far higher priorities than environmental education. Many
of these kids come from low-income families, says their schoolteacher,
Janie Chodosh. Most are Hispanic; many are Mexican immigrants. The kids volunteer rapid-fire questions
about the skull: "Where did it come from?" "Why does it
have teeth?" "How come skulls are always white?" Finally,
from a girl who can barely contain her impatience: "When are we going
outside?" Randall Davey's field-studies program
for fifth graders uses an English-Spanish field journal that introduces
kids to scientific inquiry and integrates literacy, writing, and art into
the lessons. Each student writes down his or her observations and reflections.
Chodosh first came up with the idea when she worked for the Randall Davey
center in the job Parmelee now holds. After Chodosh left for her own classroom,
Parmelee further developed the program, which is partially funded by the
city of Santa Fe. This year 20 fifth-grade classes in 13 schools are enrolled.
Each class gets four days of Parmelee's or Lagalo's time, including a
field trip. The center offers a variety of other
science programs for schools, including teacher training, field trips,
and service projects, plus a summer camp, family nights, and adult classes.
All are part of the center's Equal Environmental Education for Everyone
initiative, which aims to reach underserved communities across a state
where per capita income and school spending are low. "This is often
the only science education these kids get," says Lagalo. Outside, Parmelee splits the class
into two groups. After giving them instructions, including what to do
if they see one of the black bears forced down from the mountains by a
drought, she takes one group. Shapiro takes the other. The kids head up
the trail noisily. They cross an irrigation ditch that
waters the center's old apple trees and head into a flat area sparsely
vegetated by chamisa bushes and bunchgrass, the dry soil rising underfoot
in dusty puffs. Their task: Look at three plots, in three different ecosystems.
List and classify everything they find. Describe what's different about
the plots and what's similar. The kids chatter as they duck under
the string that marks off the first plot, a rough circle about 25 feet
across in a meadow dotted with stubby juniper trees. The sun has warmed
the day. After digging in their knapsacks for water bottles, the students
poke about, admiring flowers, searching for insects, investigating rodent
holes, all the while asking questions: "What's this bug?" "How
do you spell juniper?" "Is this a snake hole?" At the third plot, a trio of rowdy
boys turn over rocks. They're hunting creepy-crawlies. The quickest of
the three uncovers a millipede and swiftly scoops up the shiny brown arthropod.
The other kids crowd around to see. "What does it feel like?"
they want to know. "Will it bite?" "No, dummy," says the kid
holding the millipede, "it eats plants. It's a . . . a . . ." "Herbivore," supplies Parmelee. "Yeah," says the tough kid,
gently putting the millipede back on the rock. "Herbivore." The ecosystems these kids are exploring
became an Audubon center through the talent of Randall Davey, a prolific
painter, and the generosity of his family. Davey moved to Santa Fe in
1920 and soon became a prominent part of the lively art scene. In 1983,
two decades after his death, his family donated his historic house, outbuildings,
and 135-acre property to the Audubon Society. A collection of Davey's
paintings, auctioned at Christie's, provided the center's initial $600,000
endowment. A capital campaign, begun in 2000, funded the new education
building, Lagalo's position, a school-bus-size parking lot, and the renovation
of the visitors' center (in the building that once stabled Davey's polo
ponies). Parmelee announces that it's time
for lunch, and the kids charge down the trail. Mynor Cabrera, a stocky
boy with brown eyes and black hair, lags behind, asking questions softly:
"Is this fuzz from a spider? What's under that leaf?" As the group approaches the center,
he announces to no one in particular,
"I want to be a scientist." Then he speeds up to reach the other
kids. --Susan J. Tweit FOR INFORMATION
on the Randall Davey Audubon Center,
call 505-983-4609 or visit www.audubon.org/chapter/nm/NM/rdac.
Asking the Right Questions
Fifth graders
from Santa Fe schools like Pinon Elementary keep bilingual journals
(left) to record observations, from the vanilla smell of a ponderosa
pine (right) to the shape of tiny creatures.
The Randall
Davey center's new education building will serve more than 10,000
New Mexicans each year.
© 2002 NASI
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STATE
OF THE STATES Texas In an effort to protect and increase the population of two endangered birds, the black-capped vireo and the golden-cheeked warbler, a diverse coalition is supporting a program to reduce cowbird parasitism in central Texas. The group--it includes Texas Audubon, Texas Parks and Wildlife, the Central Texas Cattleman's Association, the Department of Defense, and private landowners--traps cowbirds, which parasitize the nests of songbirds. More than 25,000 cowbirds were captured in 2001 as part of the program, which seems to be working: Where the cowbird traps have been used for consecutive years, rates of songbird nest parasitism are decreasing. Audubon has been promoting the cowbird-trapping program to landowners, and volunteers have been setting up traps and training the owners in their use. California "Bringing Back the Bay," a report that details a vision of restoring 100,000 acres of wetlands to San Francisco Bay, has been released by Audubon's San Francisco Bay Restoration Program. The goal is to reclaim the wetlands--lost over the past century to development, farming, and the salt-extraction business--in the next 20 years and to improve the quality of life for the Bay Area's more than 500 species of fish and wildlife as well as its 7 million human residents. "The benefit will be in increased habitat for animals and in increased recreational opportunities for people," says Debbie Drake, the program's director. A century ago the bay was surrounded by almost 200,000 acres of marshes and nearly 100,000 acres of seasonal wetlands. Today less than 20 percent of that habitat remains, and during the next 20 years, when the state's population is projected to grow by 1.3 million, the pressure to develop these remaining areas will intensify. Twenty endangered species currently live in or around the bay, including the western snowy plover, the salt marsh harvest mouse, and the California clapper. To read the report, check out www.AudubonSFbay.org. Missouri Audubon Missouri's Native Ecotype Program aims to supply seeds from native plants to growers throughout the state. The program collects and distributes seeds in an effort to assist prairie restoration and conservation efforts. "There is less than one percent of our prairie regions left [in Missouri]," says Becky Erickson, the project's coordinator. "The prairie got plowed up and paved over." Erickson says the project supplies seeds to "just about anyone" committed to growing native plants. Audubon then encourages the growers to sell the seeds from those plants to the Missouri Department of Transportation or to conservation programs as a way to permanently maintain a native-seed base. Restoring local plants also brings back native insects, which, in turn, help bring back the birds. "This is a worthwhile project that the whole central United States needs," says Erickson. "It's larger than just our state boundaries." |
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Chapter In Florida, the Kissimmee Valley Audubon Society is in the midst of restoring the historic Steffee family homestead, which will be the site of a new nature center in Osceola County. "When completed, this will be a premier regional nature center and wildlife educational resource in Florida," says Forrest Clark, former president of the chapter and a 15-year chapter member. The 182-acre property dates back to 1880, when the Steffee settlers came to Florida from Kentucky. It includes the original homestead and a river house that was used for hunting and fishing parties 50 to 70 years ago. Though it's only 25 miles from bustling Orlando, "the site presents a genuine picture of pristine old Florida as it looked 100 years ago, with a forest of huge oaks, cypress, and pines," says Clark. Parsons, a town of 11,514 people, set in the plains and rolling hills of southeastern Kansas, is known as the state's Purple Martin Capital. Each year an estimated 1,000 of the bluish-black swallows come to Parsons, where they move into martin houses maintained by the Southeast Kansas Audubon Society. Once declining across the United States, the population of purple martins has rebounded thanks to such conservation efforts. David Liittschwager, a renowned photographer of rare and endangered species, recently created two benefit portraits of the western burrowing owl for California's Santa Clara Valley Audubon Society. With the bird's population falling locally and throughout the state, the chapter is now working with other environmental groups on a petition to list this owl as threatened in California. Proceeds from Liittschwager's prints will help finance the efforts. To get a look at the portraits, go to www.scvas.org/owlfundraiser.html. |