pollinator garden is a smashing success

I’ve been worthless about posting to this blog about my Meet the Wild nature education elective, and a lot has happened in the past year and a half. But with two more class sections getting underway in this new semester, I feel motivated to offer an update.

Last fall, I wrote about participating in the Great Georgia Pollinator Census (now expanded to be the Great Southeast Pollinator Census) and how my students were motivated to plant a new native wildflower garden.

Well, we did it. My fall semester kids drew up a plan (of sorts) and got to work preparing the soil.

My two spring semester classes got to do the planting.

I was gone all summer but got a couple of volunteers to make sure the plot got watered occasionally. When school started again in August and the next GSPC came around, our little plot was thriving.

I cannot overstate how productive and entertaining this little patch has been—and what a welcome evolution it has been for the course, which could previously get a little samey-samey over the course of a semester (we tended to be sort of “all-birds, all the time”).

Ideally, we’d be busy expanding the pollinator garden into a new bed this semester—right now it’s a little too small to support an entire class section’s concurrent journaling—but there’s new campus construction coming in the summer, and the garden’s future is uncertain.

For kids who grow up awash in gloomy messages about the environment, the lesson that one can effect tangible, immediate benefit through habitat creation and care is life-giving.

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we count pollinators because pollinators count

On Friday, we participated in the Great Georgia Pollinator Census. I hadn’t even heard about the event before Tuesday when I stumbled upon it while dropping down a deep entomology-for-beginners internet rabbit-hole, but I’m ever-so-thankful that I did. Friday’s class was magical.

My immediate problem was that I didn’t know where on campus I might take my kids to easily find and count pollinators. I walked all over central campus looking for a convenient assemblage of wildflowers, but the best I could do on short notice was two smallish clumps of non-native butterfly bush (Buddleia davidii) right outside the front entrance to Clarkson Hall. How was I going to keep sixteen 8th graders engaged with a couple of bushes that occupy less area than the copy machine in the teachers’ lounge?

I needn’t have worried.

The flow of the class went like this: 1) we watched an exceptionally well written and produced YouTube video from PBS/Nature called The Power of Pollinators, 2) we went through the GGPC PowerPoint presentation on basic insect identification (they keep the categories broad enough to be easily mastered but differentiated enough to be interesting and fun), 3) we stepped outside and counted (the actual count only takes 15 minutes), and 4) we shared our thoughts about the experience. I had the students work in groups of four and gave each group a zone to monitor, but much of this order dissolved (in the best way possible) once the kids discovered that these flowers were a veritable zoo. And not just a zoo, but a petting zoo, thanks to our beautifully docile bumblebees.

Consequently, I’m quite sure our data collection didn’t pass any sort of scientific muster. But in terms of the top two stated goals of the census—to increase awareness of pollinators and to encourage the development of more pollinator gardens—I think we crushed it. In our debrief at the end, several students wanted to plant a better garden. I just nodded sagely. I’ll let it be their idea when we go visit the empty beds right outside of my classroom.

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