How are local schoolchildren becoming involved with the management of wildlife refuges in northern Vermont? An article written by NorthWoods staff member Maria Young was recently featured in the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s May/June issue of the Refuge Update and answers that question. Start reading below, then head on over to the Refuge Update.
Hard at work with loppers, bow saw and a swing blade, an eighth–grader from Stratford, NH, paused to share the complexities of conservation work as he had begun to see them.
“Last spring, we were planting trees,” he said. “Now, we are cutting trees down.”
So it was that—through the Nulhegan Watershed Conservation and Education Initiative—more than 50 seventh– and eighth–grade students living near Silvio O. Conte National Fish and Wildlife Refuge’s Nulhegan Basin Division in northern Vermont experienced firsthand the vagaries of conservation management.
The recently completed two–year initiative was funded by a National Fish and Wildlife Foundation Nature of Learning Program grant and led by the NorthWoods Stewardship Center. Via the initiative, the students used the watershed refuge as their classroom, first to study how climate change and increased water temperature affect Atlantic salmon native to the Nulhegan Basin. Then, they focused on the American woodcock.
They started each phase by asking: What is the goal of conservation?
In spring 2011, the students asked that question as they looked down a steep eroded bank along a wide sweep of the Connecticut River. There, the answer was clear. Years of agricultural grazing had led to destabilization of the riverbank as the soil and its vegetative cover eroded. Nearby farmland and a highway made that particular area a conduit for runoff into the river. Sediment and agricultural inputs of nitrogen and phosphorous degraded water quality, to the detriment of native cold–water fish species.