September means two things: the warm sunny days of summer are waning and school is in session. While the last few beach days will soon slip away, the Denison Pequotsepos Nature Center (DPNC) wants everyone to know that’s no reason to stay inside.
“I think part of it is biological. We’re sort of like bears because when it starts to get cold and get dark early, you just want to go home and curl up with a good book and a cup of tea,” DPNC Director Maggie Jones said. “But we still offer opportunities when people might say, ‘Oh, I can’t go swimming’ or ‘I can’t go to the beach anymore, there’s nothing to do outside.’ Well there’s…a lot happening all year round; you just have to know what to look for and when and where to look. That’s what we do.”
A combination natural history museum, wildlife sanctuary, school, store, and event center, DPNC is situated on a 300-acre preserve of varied terrain with more than eight miles of hiking trails. Inside, the natural history museum offers unique perspectives into the wetlands, meadow, and woodland habitats of southeastern Connecticut and the flora and fauna that live here with a multitude of exhibits and displays. But the overwhelming focus of DPNC is the wide array of environmental education programs and events offered year-round.
Every week there are numerous home-school classes and after-school programs focusing on everything from insects to wilderness survival. The programs are so popular that Jones and DPNC Director of Education Kim Hargrave decided to strictly limit the number of children allowed in a given program to keep student-teacher ratios low. Some of the popular home-school and after-school programs offered this fall feature topics such as habitats, geology, life cycles, freshwater life, survival basics, and local flora and fauna. Jones explained that planning these programs takes a lot of time and consideration.
“When we sit down to plan our programs…we’re really coordinating on a lot of different levels,” she explained. “We’re looking at the kinds of things that might appeal to families, and those might be things that we offer on weekends or after hours, like our full-moon hikes and picnics and different explorations. But we’re also looking at school curricula for different grades and things in the science department that they would be focusing on at a particular grade level. That’s especially important for home-schoolers because they have to meet a lot of those same curricula, and so we might offer those programs on weekdays.”
And while much of their programming is geared toward children, DPNC also offers a variety of adult and family programs including hiking, geocaching, river cruises, and, perhaps most popular, bird watching.
“We have such a variety of habitats, so we have a great variety of birds,” Jones said. “We’re right on the Atlantic flyway and this is prime time for bird watching in southeastern Connecticut. People often think of the spring as the time to watch birds but if I had to pick one season it would be now. We’re right in the middle of the southward migration which started in mid-July, but now it’s at its peak.”
Special Festivals
In addition to many adult and children’s programs, DPNC also hosts special events, including the upcoming and ever-popular Wild Mushroom Festival to be held on Sunday, Sept. 28 from 2 to 6 p.m. As Jones explained, the festival, which is now in its seventh consecutive year, began as a relatively small event, but has since become a local favorite.
“[The Wild Mushroom Festival] was something that started off really small and just got huge,” Jones said. “We knew there was this underlying interest in mushrooms—kind of a mushroom mystique—and it turns out that there are a lot more people interested in mushrooms than we ever thought. It’s grown from a program with about a dozen participants, to 30, to 100, and now to several hundred. This year we anticipate more than 600 people.”
Other upcoming events include the Going Green Gala at the Mystic Yachting Center, which is DPNC’s major fund-raiser, the popular Spooky Nature Trail, which is held in October, and the Centennial celebration of the steamship Sabino.
Even with all of the programs and events seemingly happening every day, Jones said they represent just the tip of the iceberg.
“What you see in our newsletter and what you see happening here at the nature center on any given day is actually a very small piece of the pie in terms of the overall programs that we actually do,” Jones explained. “The bulk of what we do is outreach programs, where we go into schools. We find that with hands-on experiences, whether we bring it to you, or you come to us, or we meet somewhere in the middle like Bluff’s Point, we can help foster that scientific curiosity and really build a strong foundation for scientific literacy and that’s really what it’s all about.”
Jones estimated that nearly 75 percent of all of DPNC’s environmental educational programs take place in schools, reaching about 50,000 people each year, with 30,000 of them being elementary- and middle-school-aged students. An impressive figure, considering DPNC only has about nine full-time employees. According to Jones, it’s that staff, combined with eight additional part-time employees and more than 100 volunteers, that have made DPNC such a successful and vital part of the community.
“I think part of our success here is due to a reputation that developed over time because we have very good staff,” Jones explained. “I think most people find out through word of mouth—not because we buy expensive ads, because we don’t. We do evaluations for most all of our programs and we almost always have overwhelmingly positive feedback. I really credit our staff—our educators are very good, they have a good rapport with children and they love what they do and I think it shows because it’s reflected in the enthusiasm of the children when they participate. And when kids are happy, parents are happy.”
For more information about the Denison Pequotsepos Nature Center, visit www.dpnc.org or call 536-1216.-