The rewards of getting kids outdoors
By Pauline Grant
When I returned recently from North Carolina with a stink bug loose in my suitcase, I did not immediately toss it out the window. I placed it under a jar on my kitchen counter. A few days later, I fed it a tiny piece of cracker and a few grains of sugar. (Surely bugs eat what we eat!) Each morning I would move the jar to check if it was still alive. After ten days under the jar, someone suggested I feed it a piece of leaf. Four weeks later it is still alive. What possessed me to want to observe the captured stink bug? Hanging out with kids in nature!
This fall I had the opportunity to volunteer with Golden Gate Bird Alliance’s Eco-Education program and to co-lead (with Eugenia Caldwell) a bird walk for children at Las Gallinas Storage Ponds in Marin. The exuberance of both these groups of children is clear reassurance that real life, physical life, is still far more exciting than screen life.
GGBA’s Eco-Education program provides nature-focused field trips and classroom activities to about 700 children from low-income elementary schools each year. I volunteered with the San Francisco part of the program, which includes field trips to GGBA’s shoreline habitat restoration site at Pier 94.
From 10 a.m. when the big yellow school bus dropped off twenty 4th graders, until they left at 2:15 p.m., there was laughter, squealing, and continuous questions about the marine, plant, and bird life. Meanwhile, the Las Gallinas bird walk – which took place on a weekend and was open to the general public — lasted an extra thirty minutes due to the inquisitiveness of the young participants.
The training to be a GGBA Eco-Education volunteer is brief – a single three-hour session at the site in San Francisco or the East Bay where you prefer to volunteer. Throughout the school year, one can commit as many or as few hours as one wants. Anthony DeCicco, the Youth Education Director for GGBA, provides the training in a very relaxed manner and offers a lot of tips for behavior management.
It’s important to note that many of the kids on these school field trips are unfamiliar with how to behave in a fragile natural environment because they have not visited one before. The pacing of activities on the day I volunteered kept just about everyone on an even keel: exploration of the wetlands in two groups (two adult volunteers per group), bird watching and identification, lunch, planting of native plants, shoreline garbage pick-up, and then marine life exploration with plastic trays. Almost every child left with wet shoes; no one complained.
Although the focus of the Las Gallinas walk was birds and the basics of birding, I found it helpful to have had the Eco-Education training and school field trip; we used many of its tools. We created our own abbreviated visual guide to some of the commonly seen or heard birds at Las Gallinas so we could ask the children questions about beak size, feet color, and eye color, and quickly show them close-up color images. Before heading out on the trail, we gave a brief lesson on how to use binoculars and how to look in a scope. (Thank you Stephen Berlyant for joining us with your scope!)
Like all well-trained field trip leaders, we scouted the ponds a few days prior in order to identify as many species as possible for our group. The 2.5-hour walk resulted in fifty-one species, delighted children, and my unexpected decision to plan more field trips for kids despite a relatively low turn-out. The rewards of being with kids outdoors are larger than the wingspan of a California Condor!
GGBA offers several bird walks for children each year. (We have two coming up in the East Bay on Sundays February 7 and 14, and I will be co-leading another walk at Las Gallinas on Saturday March 5: Click here for info!)
But given the large number of top-notch birding spots in the Bay Area, the growing popularity of birding amongst a younger population, and the urgent need to connect children with the natural world, we could offer a lot more than we currently do.
What is needed? More volunteers willing to lead these outings! If you’re interested in helping expand GGBA’s bird walks for young people, please contact me at pauline.grant@att.net. Or if you’d like to volunteer on school field trips with our Eco-Education program, contact Anthony at adecicco@goldengatebirdalliance.org.
—————————————