A River Runs Through It Wahkiakum High School students use kayaks in the Columbia River to retrace part of Lewis and Clark's Trail. A school on the edge of the Columbia River Estuary combines science and stewardship right in its own backyard

Story by Lee Sherman, Photos by Roger Werth, Longview Daily News

Cathlamet, Washington—The abundant waters, woodlands, and wildlife of Wahkiakum County are as much a part of the local high school as they are of the local landscape. Like the many ice-cold creeks and streams that run into the Columbia River estuary here, a rich current of human and natural history feeds the minds of kids curious about the world and their place in it. Wahkiakum High School's deeply embedded philosophy of hands-on learning links the past with the present, the earth with the economy, and the classroom with the wider world.

The Birds And The Bees

For 11th-grader Brian Taylor, those links matter a lot. Before he got hooked on a biology project to save endangered ducks, Brian spent lunch hours standing at his locker with his head in a book, reports Principal Bob Anacker. He didn't have a niche in the school community. But now this quiet boy who wants to become a veterinarian is known around campus as the "duck man" for his vast knowledge and deep concern for the wood duck—a species whose numbers have plunged as habitat has shrunk.

Brian can tell you pretty much everything there is to know about wood duck habits and habitat. That's because he helped build 10 boxes of rough-cut cedar—chosen because it "weathers well," he says—in his natural resources class. The boxes were designed to the specifications of the Department of Fish and Wildlife with the guidance of local ecologist and outdoorsman Andrew Emlen, who runs the Skamokawa Estuary Program and Paddle Center.

 With his biology class, Brian helped scout the nearby Julia Butler Hansen National Wildlife Refuge for just the right riparian zone—an "area around a stream or a pond that has a lot of vegetation," Brian explains. Through his research on the Web and in the library, Brian learned that wood ducks—the magnificent, hooded birds that were hunted for their iridescent plumage back when feathered hats were the fashion—need slow-moving water unaffected by tides. They also need a complete menu of macroinvertebrates (mostly bugs) and freedom from predators, such as ospreys, that threaten ducklings. Evidence of other animals, however, such as beaver and other species of waterfowl, is a good thing—a reliable indicator of a healthy ecosystem.

Under a steel-gray sky in late February, the students loaded their bird boxes into a bus and traveled to the 5,000-acre refuge, which is home to a population of endangered Columbian white-tailed deer as well as a wintering area for migratory birds such as tundra swans and Canada geese. Brian and his fellow science students took turns climbing a 10-foot ladder to secure the boxes to the trunks of redwood, alder, and Sitka spruce trees.

Then they waited. Every other week, they checked the boxes for disturbances in the bedding of cedar shavings, which the ducks supplement with mosses, grasses, and feathers. When the students found hens in four of the boxes by month's end, the seriousness of the habitat shortage hit home. Lacking enough suitable, natural hollows for nesting in the shrinking wetlands, these hens may not have reproduced without human intervention.

By early March, eight of the boxes housed hens sitting on clutches of 10 to 12 eggs. While the eggs incubated, the students monitored embryonic development by floating them in water to test buoyancy. As the weeks went by, the young scientists discovered that the eggs' buoyancy decreased because of the changing ratio of gases to solids. In about a month, the eggs were sinking—a signal for the imminent arrival of new life on Planet Earth. When the hatchlings were ready to leave the nest, they climbed a wire screen tacked on the inside wall of each box, just beneath the entry hole. Then the tiny puffballs took a free-fall that would make Disneyland's Splash Mountain look like a kiddy ride.

"They're almost nothing but down," says biology teacher Jeff Rooklidge, who oversees the wood duck project. "They weigh less than an ounce. They can't fly—they just sort of splat on the ground and follow mom to water."

The project gives kids lots of "authentic" learning—work that has real value to the community and that mirrors the kinds of activities carried out in actual workplaces.

Rather than limiting their learning to classroom labs and paper-and-pencil exams that end up in the trash bin, Brian and his classmates are contributing to the knowledge base on wood ducks. Using cutting-edge technologies such as Global Positioning System (GPS) devices to map the nesting sites and painstakingly collecting data on nesting patterns and hatch rates, the students are producing information that merits entry into the database of the California Waterfowl Organization. They've also made presentations to community groups, including gatherings of state-level politicians and other dignitaries.

Besides learning about ecosystems, wildlife habitat, and the importance of wetlands, Rooklidge says, kids have grappled with some tough ethical questions. For example, what happens if another species invades a box? Last year, one box was taken over by starlings, and two others by wild bees. The students discovered through their research that bees are good for ecosystems because they pollinate plants. So the bees stayed. The starlings, however, got the boot for being a nonnative species. The duck that had been displaced by the starlings moved right back in.

Ultimately, the project is helping to bring these stunningly beautiful birds back from the brink of extinction, an accomplishment whose enormity isn't lost on the students. "When you actually go out and do stuff, you feel like you're making a difference," says Brian, who recently won the Columbia River Stewardship Award from the Lower Columbia River Partnership. "You're helping the wood ducks—plus you're having a lot of fun trompin' through the woods with your buddies."

Paddling Into The Past

The historic town of Cathlamet, home of Wahkiakum High School, perches picturesquely on a riverside bluff, witness to the Columbia's last, lazy leg before it empties into the sea. It's this rich mixing of saltwater and fresh, with the bountiful life forms that thrive in an estuarial environment, that makes Wahkiakum County a natural laboratory for all kinds of hands-on projects.

The most noteworthy of these is the Corps of Estuary Discovery. First funded in 1998 by a grant from the Lower Columbia Estuary Partnership, the interdisciplinary project was an easy fit for a school whose long tradition of hands-on learning includes a salmon hatchery, an 80-acre farm forest, restoration of local streams, and tree-planting on the wildlife refuge. Major goals of the project, according to Rooklidge, are three:

1. Forging community partnerships
2. Providing stewardship of local resources through hands-on activities
3. Showing how science intersects with students' world

"Our community is so rich with natural resources," the biology teacher observes. "A lot of our kids are from second-, third-, and fourth-generation families that came here for the fishing, the timber, the farming. This project relates biology in a meaningful way to students' lives."

But it's not only biology: Literature, writing, history, art, drama, and technology are among the other subjects that enrich and supplement the science. With the estuary as the hub around which the project is organized, teachers across the curriculum bring their expertise to the task of creating a detailed portrait of the place these kids call home.

The small, anvil-shaped county of Wahkiakum, tucked away in Washington's sparsely populated southwest corner, brims with readymade lessons. This was where explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark first caught the scent of the Pacific Ocean after their two-year mission to map and describe the unsettled American West.

It is at this juncture in history that Rooklidge and English teacher Jessica Fletcher draw students into a richly experiential series of activities. Based on the explorers' journals, students take on the roles of characters from Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery and act out some of their experiences. Rooklidge says the students are riveted by the stories of true-life adventure; the harrowing accounts of several narrow escapes from charging grizzlies, especially, get students' imaginations going.

Last winter, after instruction in kayak handling and safety, the 10th-graders paddled their way through a day in the life of the intrepid explorers. Mid-river, Rooklidge signaled students to rest their paddles while he read an excerpt from the journals dated November 7, 1805: A cloudy, foggy morning, light rain . We set out early and proceeded by canoe on the Columbia River site under a high, rugged hill with steep ascent, the shore bold and rocky, the fog so thick we could not see across the river. At this point, Andrew Emlen of the Paddle Center, who wrote the original proposal that won the estuary project grant, paddled into view. He played the role of a Native river dweller, leader of a party that encountered the explorers that wet Thursday nearly 200 years ago on this very spot. Rooklidge read on as the students floated quietly in their kayaks: Two canoes of Indians met and returned with us to their village. They gave us to eat some fish and sold us wapato roots, three dogs, and two otter skins, for which we gave them fishhooks, principally, of which they were very fond. These people call themselves the Wahkiakum.

The students learned that when Lewis and Clark hit The Dalles in the Columbia Gorge, they slogged through rain every day westward thereafter. Their deerskin clothes were rotting off their backs, but the Natives they met were dry under their weatherproof cedar capes and caps. The students then followed their make-believe Indian guide to the actual site where historians believe the tribal village stood. The students walked around the gargantuan trunks of ancient Sitka spruce trees, the silent sentinels that witnessed the historic meeting of the Wahkiakum and the explorers. They talked about how those virgin lands had changed in the ensuing years.

The students took on the roles of both Clark and Lewis that day. Using the pre-GPS technologies of compasses and declination to take bearings, they drew maps of the area in the same way Clark had done in the 19th century. They scoured the woods for plant specimens and wrote field notes in their journals, using botanical terms. They sketched the various flora in the same way that Lewis, the naturalist, once did. Meanwhile, drama students recorded the students' explorations and discoveries with a digital camera to document the activities for community presentations.

In all, the students visited eight sites mentioned in the Lewis and Clark journals, from Cathlamet to Skamokawa. "We get them thinking about how these men went through here 200 years ago and saw some of the same things that we're looking at right now," Principal Anacker says. "And then we get them to think about how things have changed since then—have they changed for the better or worse? There's some reflection going on, too."

Students record those reflections in their personal journals back in Fletcher's English classroom. In fact, Fletcher intends to take her sophomores on a field trip to gather wild goose feathers at the refuge. The quill pens they make from the feathers will, she hopes, inspire students to write more authentically about their Lewis and Clark experience.

And to bring all this local history back home to these 21st-century teenagers, Fletcher asked them to interview family members to learn which ancestor or relative was the first to arrive in Wahkiakum County and what drew him here. She holds up a fat binder stuffed with the resulting family stories—now part of the permanent record of the community.

"The project is really a blessing for me," says Fletcher, "because English and science aren't generally two disciplines that get together a whole lot."

Beetles, Weevils, And Bats

The estuary project has other facets, as well. They include:

In this tight-knit community where everyone has a connection to everyone else, projects like these are more easily pulled off than in urban areas, says Anacker. "Small schools and small communities can get things done easier," he says, noting that there are only five landowners on Nelson Creek, where a watershed restoration project is just getting underway. A similar project in a community the size of Portland might involve hundreds of landowners. Observes Anacker, "We don't have to jump through a lot of hoops."

Agriculture and natural resources teacher John Doumit is one of those five landowners along Nelson Creek. He still farms the land that's been in his family since his pioneer grandfather, an itinerant peddler, settled down in these fertile hills to open a general store and raise a family. "That was in the days when the only way into this place was steamboat or horseback," Doumit reports.

Finding and connecting those links on an unbreakable chain from the past into the future is what project-based learning is about, he says.

"By being part of these things, students start to make the connections that are going to be valuable for them in the future—connections that will help to shape their attitudes and their actions down the road," says Doumit. "We're encouraging them to weave those threads: How does what happened in the past affect us today? How is what's happening today different from what's happened in the past?"

Adds Doumit: "We're encouraging our kids to think and to act. A lot of times, those are the two things that are missing."