Dr. Nichols visited our program on the Taku this summer as part of a growing relationship between Round River and Westminster College. We were honored to have him with us, and look forward to more visits by Jeff and his colleagues to all of our programs in the future.
Learning on the Taku with Round River
I just returned from a week’s site visit to Round River Conservation Studies’ Taku Summer Program. Westminster College recently partnered with Round River, who suggested that we send an Environmental Studies faculty member to check out the program. That’s me. Nine undergraduate students (mostly biology and environmental studies majors) from around the country spent six weeks based in Atlin, British Columbia, on the Taku River Tlingit First Nation’s (TRTFN) traditional territory. The surrounding country is spectacular – a “landscape of superlatives,” as one student, Sylvia Kinosian, called it – with miles of boreal forest, enormous lakes, powerful rivers, and abundant salmon, caribou, sheep, goats, grizzly and black bears and wolves. I couldn’t wait.
Woodland caribou on a snowy ridge near Atlin, BC
Round River describes itself as “an ecological research and education organization whose goal is the formulation and implementation of conservation strategies that conserve and restore wilderness.” The Taku summer program consists of three linked courses: Applied Conservation Biology, Introduction to Biological Field Methods, and Natural History of Boreal and Coastal Temperate Forests. The intensive program is led by Susie Dain-Owens and Will Tyson. The courses include some lectures, plenty of reading, and group discussions, but are mostly based on lots of hiking and camping with close, continuous observation of the natural world carefully recorded in field journals using the Grinnell method.
Students search for wildlife from the top of Spruce Mountain
The results are impressive: students gain a remarkably holistic view of the region. While they were responsible for creating three in-depth “species profiles” over the summer (along with content and practical exams), they were interested in everything. On the hikes I took with them they paid close attention to and asked dozens of questions about everything from lichens to golden eagles, wolf skulls to saxifrages. I was reminded of the boundless curiosity about the world that we see in Thoreau’s journals. There was no artificial boundary between “human” and “wild,” either: one of the most impressive aspects of the program is the attention paid to how humans interact with the non-human world. Despite its “wild” character (a problematic concept that students wrestled with) this has been the Tlingits’ homeland for many generations and a working landscape for later arrivals, with extensive placer mining, hunting, fishing, and logging. The students talked and ate with Tlingit and other locals and took a nine-day hike to the Nakina River, a traditional trek to salmon fishing grounds that Tlingit elders revived a few years ago. Just as I left the students were preparing to join the Tlingit at their “culture camp” which features traditional language, foodways, music, dancing, and art. As a result students learn much of the human and social context of the TRTFN’s history and their vibrant, continuing presence on their land. Round River’s ongoing research in the region (for which students also gathered data) includes hoary marmot surveys, climate change-related vegetation surveys, and ungulate (caribou, Stone sheep and mountain goat) observations. All three projects were developed in partnership with the TRTFN and are meant to further the Tlingits’ stewardship efforts.
Students help set up a wall tent at the Tlingit Tlatsini Culture Camp
Hiking into the Consolation Creek valley
My home institution, Westminster College, sent three students (Nico Shaffer, Joe Valceschini, and Sawyer Hill) to this year’s program and I was happy and proud to see how much they learned. Sawyer earned a perfect grade on his final Grinnell journal, something unprecedented in Will Tyson’s experience. (I can’t take any credit for Sawyer’s academic training or work ethic as I had never met him before this week.) Like any such program, all the students also gained the unquantifiable benefits of close living and working together under sometimes trying conditions. They cooked and cleaned up, looked out for each other’s safety, shared newly gained knowledge, and fought (amiably) over music selection and the shotgun seat in Round River’s beat-up Suburbans. Susie and Will were excellent leaders – knowledgeable and competent – and along with a good bunch of students they obviously created a positive atmosphere.
I was jealous of their experience and wished I could spend more time.