The Next Generation of Conservationists Need to Get Their Hands Dirty

For students visiting the Iain Nicolson Audubon Center at Rowe Sanctuary, a field trip is more than a day away from the classroom. It is an opportunity to experience the natural world firsthand and, as students get older, to become active participants in the science and conservation happening around them.

It might mean getting your hands wet while wading through a wetland with a dip net. It might mean sweeping a prairie for insects, documenting birds by sight, dissecting cow pies (fecal matter) to see what Sandhill Cranes eat, or carefully placing a tiny tag on the wing of a Monarch butterfly before releasing it to continue its journey south.

Rowe's field trips are designed to help students build a relationship with the natural world through hands-on exploration and indelible experiences. And sometimes that means making a mess.

Our youngest visitors become Nature Detectives, using their senses, hand lenses, and monoculars to investigate their surroundings and solve a natural mystery. Students in elementary and middle school can explore Wild Wetlands, using dip nets to discover the life hiding beneath the surface while learning why wetlands are such important habitats. During our Prairie Power field trips, students explore prairie plants, birds, and their adaptations and even sweep the prairie for insects. What might look like a simple search for bugs becomes an opportunity to discover just how much life is packed into a grassland ecosystem. And through Birding Basics, students learn to look and listen closely. Younger students use monoculars and interactive activities to explore bird adaptations, while students in grades 4–6 become community scientists by documenting birds by sight and sound and exploring the fascinating world of migration. In Crane Season, we have students learn about the Sandhill Crane Migration by dissecting cow pies to see why cranes use them to find food resources, play migration games, and explore crane anatomy.

These experiences help students move from simply seeing nature to observing, questioning, and understanding it.

As students grow, so does the complexity of their field trip experiences.

In Rowe's Living Environment program, students in middle school explore how plants and animals depend on one another and examine how human activities can have a profound impact on the physical environment.  High school students participating in FFA Range and Natural Resources programs can dive deeper into native plants, range judging, and plant identification. They can also explore topics in environmental and natural resource sciences, including native and invasive species, habitat management, and soil and water management.

This fall, students will have another opportunity to participate in conservation through a special monarch tagging experience at Rowe.  During the fall migration, many monarchs migrate south toward their overwintering grounds in Mexico. Students participating in our fall field trips will have the opportunity to capture monarchs, collect information about them, and carefully apply a small identification tag before releasing them.

Each tagged butterfly becomes part of a much larger scientific effort through Monarch Watch, a community science project. Students aren't simply learning about monarch migration, they are contributing observations and data to a real research project.

And there is something pretty remarkable about that. 

For a student, it can make the idea of migration suddenly feel very real. Our goal isn't simply to teach students facts about ecosystems or migration.  It's to help them understand that these systems are connected and that the choices people make can affect their health and sustainability.

That's where things get especially exciting.

At Rowe, we believe that inspiring the next generation of conservationists means giving young people opportunities to experience nature, ask questions, contribute to science, and get involved in caring for the places around them.

Because sometimes conservation begins with curiosity.

Sometimes it begins with a discovery.

And sometimes, it begins with getting your hands dirty.

If you’re interested in a field trip at Rowe Sanctuary, please reach out to Education Manager, Amanda Hefner, at amanda.hefner@audubon.org.