The Outdoor Classroom

Each of us can name a defining moment or event that has shaped our lives. I was eleven years old, soon to complete the sixth grade, unaware how the morning would impact my life. It was the time of year when the tender leaves of oaks unfurl chartreuse against the backdrop of blue sky. Later, I would refer to this as the time of warblers.

In the sunlight of a May morning, our sixth-grade class walked single file onto the yellow bus that would transport us to the Watchung Nature Center. At the center, staff naturalists efficiently divided our class into two groups before leading us into the wild heart of nature. For half the morning, half the class would learn about insects, while other half studied birds.

As instructed, I held up the hand lens to the face of a fly and stared lock-eyed with what appeared to be a thousand eyes. This was my first close-up encounter with a creature that had nearly 360 degrees of vision. No wonder flies were impossible to swat! Soon after my encounter with the compound eye, I was equipped with a bug box and net. I rustled the grass and shrubs to find butterflies, beetles, crickets, grasshoppers, cicadas, leafhoppers, and ants. My world was filled with the six-legged critters that flew, crawled, and chomped away at everything green.

Although my morning with the insects was fascinating—certainly better than any bookish lesson in a stuffy classroom—it could not compare to the thrill of birds. For the first time in my life, I was handed a pair of binoculars and instructed to spot the singers. The naturalist explained how each bird was specifically adapted to its habitat and how the shape of the bill was a clue to where the bird lives and what it eats. We learned that conical-shaped bills belonged to seedeaters and thin bills to those that picked bugs from under bark. We observed yellow-rump and black and white warblers flitting high in the oak canopy, busily picking insects off leaves and twigs with their slender bills, as mourning doves cooed from woody perches and red-tailed hawks let their voices tumble in shrieks from the sky above. We spotted a mother robin sitting on a clutch of blue eggs in a nest made of dried grass and mud. Below her, a rufous-sided towhee scratched in the duff for insects. Blue jays and cardinals called from the thicket as I fell under the spell of birdsong and color.

That evening, I asked my father for a pair of binoculars. I was hooked. I have been birding either professionally or for enjoyment ever since. Often I think back on how lucky I was to have that special morning at the nature center.

Last week I participated in another exceptional morning. I arrived at the Bandelier National Monument bird banding station at about 9 a.m. Wildlife biologist Steve Fettig and his Latin American interns, Diego and Pilar, had been monitoring the nets since sunrise. Steve held a ruby-crowned kinglet in his hand, carefully banding, aging, and weighing the diminutive migrant.

  

For nine years, Steve has been operating the banding station in conjunction with the Park Flight Migratory Bird Program.  The program works to protect shared migratory bird species and their habitats in both U.S. and Latin American national parks. The data Steve collects provides information on how the birds use the diverse habitats of northern New Mexico.

As part of the program, local school children visit the station to gain firsthand knowledge of animal-habitat relationships. The kids engage in activities highlighting species diversity and adaptation.  

At 9:30 a.m., thirteen sixth graders arrived. Beth, a naturalist from the Pajarito Environmental Education Center, greeted the students. Since the group was small, Beth and I would work together with the children. After a mist net demonstration, we led the class into the forest to see it was able to support the bird species that each child had chosen as his or her “identity” for the morning.

This chilly morning in the Jemez Mountains would become a defining experience for many of these children, shaping lives that cared about the natural world, a world where science matters. At the banding table, we watched as thin metal bands were painlessly clamped onto the delicate legs of juncos, siskins, and warblers. Each child was eager be chosen as the one to release the captive bird back into the wild. Faces were bright with awe as feathered life was placed into the palm of the lucky child.

Two boys, Jack and Will, vastly different in their demeanor, remained at the station with their mothers, after the rest of the class departed. I heard Jack asking Steve how could he learn more about the birds in the area. Will remained silent as he raised his binoculars and scoped every tree and shrub for birds. These youngsters were hooked.

High Water

High Water July 11, 2012

In many ways this seems like a typical summer: a skink scurries across the trail taking refuge in last year’s fallen leaves, Cooper’s Hawks raise their young, along the creek, in an old cottonwood tree, Turkey Vultures stretch their wings in the warmth of the morning sun and each day I guide visitors into heart  the of Frijoles Canyon. We walk the path of the Ancestral Puebloans, peer into kivas, hike through Tyuonyi village and climb high into cavates. Together we watch sunlight slide across the south-facing cliff and the afternoon thunderheads build.

It is monsoon season in a land scarred by fire. It has been one year since the Las Conchas Fire blazed more than twentythousand acres of Bandelier National Monument. To the casual visitor this means little. Mostly, the evidence of the burn remains out of view. For the individual venturing into the backcountry the experience is different. Bare ground and ponderosa pine skeletons tell the tale of last year’s inferno. A story of a fire I would rather forget, but I can’t and don’t.

Every day, I witness activity related to the fallout of combustion. Where there is fire there is often flood. Without vegetation rooted into the soil the burned-out canyons can't hold back the rain. Last August the creek swell scoured lichen from rocks, and logs, vegetative debris and boulders tumbled down the trail, wrapping and resting in heaps around tree trunks, leaving our parking lot filled with muddied ash. This summer we expect the same. When the sky darkens we wonder, “Will it flood today?”

Last week the creek rose high enough, with a current strong enough, to wash away footbridges and leave us wondering when high water will come again.

This afternoon I hear the sky rumble and watch fast-moving clouds. The park radio crackles, I hear the voice of our chief ranger, “Bandelier employees Bandelier employees, I know you are concerned, but the big cell has passed. It is to the south and we have received little rain in the upper watershed.” I relax. The Visitor Center is safe for now.

Thousands of sandbags and concrete barriers are positioned to divert high water away from our historic Visitor Center. Last year the barriers were successful in protecting the structure. This year we hope for the same good fortune.

Admittedly, the flood protection and last year’s jumble of flood debris flanking the creek appear a bit odd in this landscape of undiminished beauty. The coyote who routinely uses the trail to hunt for mice and  the fawn strechting her wobbly legs pay little attention to concrete and sand. Yet each sandbag serves as a reminder to walk alert, listening for the sound of a rising creek, while knowing there is refuge on higher ground.

Wash Out

Hope

 “The trail is washed out.”  Those were the last words I heard out of Elliot’s mouth before closing the visitor center door.  I zip my jacket, nod to the folks getting out of the RV with Maine plates and walk across footbridge to the Falls trailhead, whispering under my breath, "It's ok, this is no big deal.” A mantra, my pep talk recited daily before heading onto the path. Elliot’s words echo through my head, “The trail is washed out, the trail is washed out…. fire, flood”. It is difficult to escape the changes to the Bandelier landscape post Las Conchas Fire.

It is late November just after Thanksgiving, the weather is mild and dry. A tardy flock of Sandhill cranes flies overhead on their route south to wintering grounds. It is late for crane migration. Nothing seems normal, not the birds, not the land.

the fallen

A winter flock surrounds me. Titmice flit and dart from under the cover of orange leaves clinging to the branches of gambel oak. The flock grows larger with the addition of juncos diligently seeking food in the vegetation along the creek. I stop and watch. My view is unobstructed. I am standing along the first hundred yards of the Falls Trail. The birds, unconcerned by my presence continue their frenetic business of finding seeds to keep them fat in winter.  What I see is odd, birds standing on prostrate trunks of alder, river birch and boxelder. Life along the creek has become horizontal.

I respond, daily, to the inquiries of puzzled visitors asking, what happened here?” “It looks like a flood came through here” When did you have a flood? How high did the water rise? Can we get to the river?

washed out trail

I reply with unpleasant truth, “No you can’t get to the river. The trail is undercut below the second falls. It is about to cleave away. No, it won’t be rebuilt, there is nowhere to construct a new route”. The same questions and the same answers spill from my from my mouth again and again in response to the curious that come to visit Frijoles Canyon since reopening in the first days of October.

sandbags and barriers

Yes, it was a flood. The water came roaring down the canyon on August 21, the day the monsoons dropped three inches of rain in twenty-five minutes. A noticeable water line on tree trunks is visible amid a tangle of broken branches, cracked limbs and leaves littered along the creek, like confetti from a ticker tape parade.

The signs of the flood are everywhere.  There is nothing to hold back the water. Most all of Frijoles Canyon, with exception of the last three miles, is severely burned. Jersey barriers and twenty thousand sand bags are strategically placed to protect the recently renovated visitor center. The back breaking attempt at flood mitigation succeeded with the exception of a few snapped steel cables linking barriers, knocked wildly to their sides, in the fury of a frothy mixture of ash and water carrying sandbags on a high tide to the banks of the Rio Grande two and a half miles downstream.

sticks and stone, mud and ash

What will happen next summer when the monsoon rains return? The thought is dizzying. I leave the juncos.  A curve in the trail reveals gray naked mounds; boulders scoured clean of lichen, once discretely hidden amid thickets of New Mexico olive and chokecherry, shimmer in the New Mexico sun. Behind me canyon walls are cloaked in mud stretching upward 15 feet.

debris littering the trail
 I place one foot in front of the other and continue my disoriented walk in a once familiar landscape.