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These boots were made for hunting … or stomping

By Mark Guydish mguydish@timesleader.com
Education Reporter
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JACKSON TWP. – When hunting the elusive mad dog skullcap or the petite spotted jewel while stomping on aptly-named skunk cabbage, you’re better off with knee-high boots. Just don’t leave those boots in the swamp mud as you lurch toward the heron nest.

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Anna Weiss, 11, and classmate Hallela Hinton-Williams, 9, investigate flora on the property of Chris Miller in Jackson Township Thursday as part of a field trip by students from Wyoming Valley Montessori School.

AIMEE DILGER/THE TIMES LEADER

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From left, Liam Gilroy, Connor McGowan, Samir Singh and Nicholas Melnick discover the aptly-named skunk cabbage, one of the plants McGowan was trying to find during a school trip.

AIMEE DILGER/THE TIMES LEADER

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Those boots marked the start of a two-hour excursion by 20 pre-teens through Chris Miller’s bio-diverse property Thursday. The students of Wyoming Valley Montessori School slipped into the oversized footwear, then slipped in them.

“I can’t walk in these!” One girl shouted with a laugh.

“Now I wish I had big feet!” a boy chuckled.

The boots, like all the equipment for this excursion and others, were bought with a state grant that funds an ongoing project that gets the kids researching plants and animals in school and searching for them out of it. The hands-on approach dovetails with the Montessori approach: Pique a child’s interest and let learning spring from there.

Each student searched for different flora. Snagging a fingernail-sized spring peeper frog or discovering a red-spotted newt, well, those were bonuses. Pluck an unidentified specimen from beneath a rock and the field books fly open while the guesses fly out. “What if it’s a poisonous one!” A girl squeaked. “What if it’s an unidentified species?” asked boy apparently hoping to get a newt named after him

Miller’s property is nearly perfect for this. His back yard is a meadow rich in wildflowers and tiny animals, with bigger ones traipsing through in quieter hours (the class has used “camera traps” to snare photos). It’s where Sereina Brenhofer fulfilled her first quest, a marsh marigold – the common buttercup.

Miller’s meadow hits a tree line that marks a steep drop into a forest with some oaks estimated at 150 years old. Here Theresa Mitten spotted an Eastern hemlock. Next on her list, the wild aster, some mad dog skullcap, and wild grapes. If she finds them, will she eat one? “I don’t think so.” she hesitated, “I don’t know what’s been on them.”

The forest folds into marsh, where dry steps grows scarce, skunk cabbage grows like, well, a weed, and muck and water threaten to suck boots off your feet, as they did for Mitten, who opted to head back to high ground after getting her big yellows back on, but before the group got deep enough to make out a distant heron’s nest.

The trip out of the marsh was more sure-footed for some and more reckless for others, as several boys galumphed straight through the muck, ignoring the winding, safer path.

“We’re out!” one yelped once on terra firma, “We’re alive!”

Come to think of it, being out here as part of school work is apt to make anyone feel “alive.”