Camp Eureka: Young Scientists Explore Montana Wetlands
14 September 05
Beth Underwood
From NFB Voice of the Nation's Blind: www.voiceofthenationsblind.org
During four sparkling days spanning the 2005 summer solstice, the Montana Conservation Science Institute, in partnership with the National Federation of the Blind (NFB), the NFB Jernigan Institute’s Science Academy, and the Missoula Branch of the Montana Association for the Blind (MAB), opened the doors to Camp Eureka!, a summer natural history camp for blind and visually impaired children. The camp offered children, 8-12 years old, an opportunity to explore western Montana’s wetland and forests under the guidance of blind mentors and with naturalists and artists trained in learning strategies for blind and visually impaired children and introduced to a positive philosophy about blindness.
The 2005 edition of Camp Eureka! was the first event of its kind not only for us, but also for the state of Montana. We had high hopes for the camp, but it seems fair to say that the gathering exceeded all our expectations. Instructors, mentors and campers forged friendships, came to new understandings, and grew in surprising and fundamental ways after only a short time together. In retrospect, it would seem that the power of the camp derived in large part from three key ideas around which the partners designed and developed the camp.
The first idea was that blind and visually impaired children would respond best to, and benefit most from, adults and young adult mentors who were also blind. This philosophy was strongly encouraged and supported by Jim Marks, president of the Missoula Branch of the MAB and Mark Riccobono, education director of the NFB Jernigan Institute, who both provided important guidance in this and many other areas. We knew blind role models would be valuable for the children, but it was not until we began to observe the interactions between campers and mentors and began receiving feedback from the children that we realized how powerful positive role models are for these children. Under the leadership of MAB president, Dan Burke, the children, in an amazingly brief time, became more comfortable with their blindness and more confident in the outdoors.
Excerpt from Dan’s journal:
"Okay, line up, I commanded. Eight Montana kids jostled themselves into something resembling order.
"Everybody have their backpacks, slates and styluses, tape recorders, water bottles?"
"Yes!" came the chorus.
"Do you all have your canes?"
"What if we can see -- do we have to have a cane?" came a voice from the restless group, somewhere at the rear of the line.
It was the first morning of the first-ever Camp Eureka!, the long-time dream of Beth Underwood to introduce blind children to the natural history of western Montana. We were about to embark on our first adventure to the Lee Metcalf National Wildlife Refuge, where we would meet with University of Montana ornithologist, Erick Greene, to learn about local bird-life -- calls, habitat, and, if the mist nets caught something, a chance to get a close-up, hands-on look at a bird.
Camp Eureka! was all about teaching campers scientific observation and recording skills using the alternative techniques of blindness. It was an opportunity to open the door to a new way of thinking about blindness - a way to learn and live successfully as a blind person. When that door opened a crack, it was my job and the job of the other blind mentors to get our foot into it and keep it open. Now, with eight 8-12 year-olds lined up in front of me, the door was opening just a crack. The question from the back of the line went right to the heart of things—how do we define ourselves: as someone who simply can't see well, or as someone who uses the proven and effective strategies of blindness. I didn't have time to think about it or engage in a philosophical discussion about blindness. Instead, I relied on my years in the NFB and my experiences as a blind person. "I can see," I responded, "and I always carry my white cane."
With that, we were off.
Later, at the lunch table, Skylar, the owner of the voice at the back of the line that morning, took a look around him and announced, "I'm the only one at this table who can see."
"We're all blind at this table," Mark Riccobono, visiting from the Jernigan Institute that day observed.
"I'm not blind," Skylar said with conviction. "I can see."
"What do you think blindness is?" one of us at the table asked in return.
"Blindness is total darkness," he replied, "but I can see."
A discussion followed, with Mark, mentor Cindy Letcher, Jim Marks and I explaining blindness as a matter of function rather than whether or not a person still has remaining vision. All of us reported that he or she could still "see" to some extent, but that they had adopted the more useful techniques of the white cane, Braille, and other strategies as more effective than trying to milk limited sight with diminishing returns. Jim remarked that he felt freer to go when and where he wished with his cane. One child whom I knew before camp piped up to ask me, "You mean you can see a little?"
"Yes."
"I didn't know that," she said, and fell silent, thinking. I thought of her sailing around the halls of her school without her cane, and I thought – I hoped – I could hear the wheels turning in her head.
That evening, after a long day of listening to and handling live birds, including a red-naped sapsucker, gyr falcon, and great horned owl, we gathered back at the Teller Wildlife Refuge for a talk. Someone found a cane detached from its owner, and I asked the child to come forward to claim it.
"Now, you have to sing," I instructed.
"No way," he demurred shyly.
"How about I sing with you?"
Music with Chip Jasmin, camp musician, was a big part of every day, and visiting Missoula-based singer-songwriter Amy Martin had performed one of my favorites earlier in the evening, "Study War No More", with the entire camp singing along. I started out to the tune of that old spiritual:
"I ain't gonna lay down my white cane
Down by the riverside,
Down by the riverside,
Down by the riverside--I ain't gonna lay down my white cane
Down by the riverside,
And walk around without it any more."
It became a camp standard; we sang it half a dozen times the next day alone. The kids demanded it, even bringing stray canes to mentors when they came upon them. By the end of camp, one girl was asking a blind mentor to help her convince her mom to get her a cane. Another boy confided to another mentor that he wished he'd brought his cane to camp with him. We had gotten the door open a bit, and begun to form a small community around positive attitudes toward blindness. We had made a start in re-defining blindness as a characteristic, and not something to be embarrassed about.
On the final evening of camp, I took two of the boys across the old farm yard to the historic barn, which the Teller Refuge uses as an education center now. Trevor, an eleven-year-old, decided to go back by himself. He used a cane, but moved with extreme caution.
"I have my cane," he observed casually. "I can walk back."
"Okay," I replied just as casually.
But I was buzzing with excitement. After he left, I crept to the door, listening to his footsteps crunching the gravel. He was going in the right direction, then he hit the grass in the right spot and I knew he was okay. I also knew it had all been worthwhile.
In addition to Dan’s leadership, we were fortunate to have the help of Danielle Matthaes (age 17) and Matt Castner (age 21), two young adult mentors who are blind. Under Dan’s guidance, Matt and Danielle became positive, strong, and wonderful role models for the children, engaging them in discussions about blindness and simply sharing in the activities and fun, while helping them identify their own roles, responsibilities, and life paths. Danielle exuded a quiet strength, competence, and perseverance. She was gentle, soft-spoken, kind, and a good listener with a genuine interest in the children to which they responded. Matt seemed to undergo a transformation of his own as he gained confidence, discovered his own unique voice and strength as he engaged the children in song and antics – the children were drawn to him. “I love working with kids!” declared Matt often and with passion. “I wish there had been a Camp Eureka! when I was a kid.”
The second key idea behind the camp was that hands-on educational activities in a natural setting are an unmatched way to build personal confidence, expand a child’s perception of the world, and provide a sense of endless possibilities. Our residence was an historic home on the Teller Wildlife Refuge in the Bitterroot Valley south of Missoula, Montana. Our “cabin”, the roomy Slack Lodge, featured a wide, old-fashioned screened in porch which wrapped around three sides of the historic home. Here the children gathered with peers in an environment surrounded by mountains, rivers, forests, and marshes. This was home and base camp for our outdoor activities. From this base the children learned about birds, river ecology, mule-packing, butterflies, local Native American culture and history, and Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery. To aid in these explorations, each camper was provided with a field pack, complete with cap, water bottle, carabineers, handkerchief, pocket notebook with slate and stylus, folding tactile ruler, and personal tape recorder. The children were encouraged to record their experiences, and readily took to the task, Brailling in their journals, and recording camp songs, bird calls, rushing water and each other. Along with memories and these physical records, the children carried home their tape recorders and notebook, and, we can hope, a lifelong desire to record the sounds and sensations of their natural environment, their own ideas, and their questions.
Excerpt from Dan’s journal:
When we arrived at the Lee Metcalf National Wildlife Refuge, we struck out down the trail to a site selected by Metcalf staff member Deb Goslin. We stopped about 12 yards from mist nets Deb had set up earlier that morning. Erick Greene began talking about the bird life around us, pointing out the variety of songs we could identify. Scientists and amateur birders locate various species by their songs, or calls, four out of five times, Greene told us.
The Metcalf Wildlife Refuge covers an area of about 2300 acres, running for three miles along the Bitterroot River. Some areas of the refuge are open meadows, where birds such as the western meadowlark nest. Other areas feature open ponds that attract waterfowl, shorebirds, and osprey. We were stationed along a riparian area along the Bitterroot River between a slough, an old oxbow of the river, and the river itself. The vegetation here included ponderosa pines, cottonwoods, willow, hawthorn, woods rose, and snowberry. Different birds, like the song sparrow, breed and nest here.
While Eric was talking, Deb walked over to check the nets.
"We've got something," she called back.
It turned out to be a red-naped sapsucker, a cousin of the yellow-bellied sapsucker of the eastern U.S. We made our way over to the net through the underbrush, where we could hear the distress calls of the captured bird. His mate was calling to him from a nearby tree. The mist nets consist of very light filaments which the birds, flying low among the trees on their daily errands can't see, and thus may fly into. The light filaments also prevent injury to the animal.
Erick described the bird's coloring, and explained that it is part of the woodpecker family and weighs about five ounces. It drills holes into trees to start sap flowing, then comes back later to collect its meal. Everyone had a chance to stroke the long curve of the bird’s powerful beak. Then we all were quiet so we could hear the sound of the bird's wings when he was released back into the wild. He flew only a few feet back to the tree where his mate waited.
We were then directed to listen to the song sparrow's call about 20 yards away. We learned that while bird songs are generally uniform within a species, each bird has his own distinctive song. We listened to a recording of the song sparrow Erick had made earlier that morning and downloaded to his laptop computer, then he replayed the song at half speed revealing a secondary accompaniment of notes sung by the bird which are too fast for human ears to detect. He played us similar recordings of three other species archived on his hard drive, each time the half-speed playback revealing almost symphonic layers of sound we couldn't otherwise hear.
We set off to find the unsuspecting sparrow. When we got close, Eric played back a recording of the song sparrow, which caused it to respond with its song again and again. Erick told us that the bird thought another song sparrow was invading its territory, and his response was a warning for the other “bird” to clear out. Taking advantage of this, the kids used a shotgun microphone, about two-and-a-half feet long with foam covering the last two feet of it, to record the bird's calls. It was plugged into a somewhat low-tech hand-held Sony cassette recorder. Erick then downloaded from the tape to his laptop and replayed the child's recording while the frustrated sparrow darted back and forth over our heads.
"That's professional quality," Eric complimented several times.
While everyone took their turn with the shotgun microphone, the other kids pulled out the little recorders they had been given, and made their own recordings of the song sparrow.
The next day we traveled to Gird Creek on the Teller Wildlife Refuge. State fisheries biologist Chris Clancy passed around tactile drawings of the bugs that feed the trout in the creek, and explained how they live in the water, eventually swim to the surface and emerge as adults, at which time the trout feed upon them. Then we were into the creek, turning over rounded stones and feeling the bottoms. We easily found tiny caddis fly houses with our fingers, built by the larvae to live in as they grew. We felt the stringy algae (periphyton) that grows on the slippery round stones on the creek bottom.
Then we tried our hand at kick nets. These consist of hardware cloth stabilized on each end with one-by-two fir. One person held the net upright in the water, while another kicked up stones a couple of yards upstream. In this way, we netted a variety of creatures living on the creek's bottom, including various insect larvae and a couple of tiny crawdads. Marybai, an eight-year-old, exploring along the bank beside an eddy, stuck her hand into the foliage hanging into the water and plucked out a small spotted frog. A couple of the kids discovered that the water on the near bank of the creek was colder than that on the far side. With one of the adult mentors, they followed the colder water to the source of a spring coming out of the creek bottom about 15 yards upstream. On the opposite bank, I caught the scent of mint, so another adult, two of the kids, and I delicately searched it out amidst the lush grasses growing beneath thorny branches of a wild rose. As individuals and as a team we explored the physical features – water, temperature, flow, rocks, vegetation, micro and macro organisms - all part of the creek environment, and gained a greater understanding of the parts that make up the whole system.
The third key idea was that this should not be a science-only natural history camp but rather one based on both the arts and sciences. Music in particular played a huge role in establishing the camp’s “personality” and humor. Throughout the camp, Chip Jasmin, our resident musician, used his musical talents and collection of instruments to set a mood, draw people together, build bonds between campers and mentors, interpret phenomena in nature, help children connect with nature, and to simply relax, let loose, and have fun. In their short time together, the children gained outdoor skills and learned some natural history. But the lasting traces of the camp will also be memories of an afternoon spent splashing, floating, and giggling in the Bitterroot River as the chords of Chip’s guitar floated in the air and of lively sing-alongs during lunches afield. “I’m not going in the water!” Trevor announced at one point early in the camp. Soon, however, his laughter and joy trilled across the ripples as he learned in the most tangible and memorable way possible about rivers by floating feet-first downstream on his back in the company of his friends.
Excerpt from Dan’s journal:
Stephanie decided to squat down just enough to get her bottom wet in the river, then jumped with a giggle. "That sounds like a great idea," I said. "I'm going to get my bottom wet, too!"
As to what occurred next, there remains some doubt. The lore of the fisherman holds that one has not truly fallen in if one's hat remains dry. My hat remained dry, but that evidence convinced few of Eureka's campers. It is true that I lowered myself close to the surface of the creek.
"Oh, ooohhh, ooooohhhhh!"
"Dan fell in! Dan fell in!" Lauren screamed comically.
To be accurate, I was in the water up to my neck. It felt great on that hot afternoon. Laughter sounded all the way down the creek, but the mockers were caught unprepared. The three nearest me took the brunt of the first splashes, and soon the creek was churned white with well-aimed geysers. Soon even the most timid of kids was involved, and one mentor, who declined to wade, citing his inappropriate shoes, was systematically drenched with hatfuls of cold water carried from the creek by industrious camper Lauren. The remainder of the afternoon was happily given over to floating.
The camp was a smashing success in so many ways. We accomplished much of what we set out to do – give the kids a sense of empowerment, connect them with mentors, develop outdoor orientation and mobility skills, and build confidence. We were pleasantly surprised and pleased with the connection that developed so quickly between children and mentors, the children’s eagerness to engage in activities and try new things, and to stretch their skill level. The kindness they displayed to each other day-in and day-out was touching. But all this does not mean we cannot improve. We learned a lot about what worked well and what was less effective, and, in doing so, have identified several things we will do differently in future camps. We will slow things down, offer fewer programs in greater detail, provide more leadership opportunities for the children, and continue to help sighted instructors and staff understand how best to communicate with the mentors and campers who are blind. People who are blind will play a greater role in staff training and camp instruction. The children, too, had many good ideas for future camps. Perhaps most importantly, the children will be given even more opportunity and freedom for personal discovery – campers will explore, experiment, and discover the wonders of nature with the help of scientists, artists, and naturalists, but they will take a greater role in choosing the path by which that exploration occurs.
Beth Underwood
Education Specialist and Camp Eureka! Director
Montana Conservation Science Institute (MOCSI)
5200 Upper Miller Creek Road
Missoula, MT 59803
Email: underhogg@montana.com
MOCSI office: 406-251-5069