Hey All!

We had a great week of school at the Residential Program last week, full of games, birds, and lots of laughter. The first two days we spent with Alexia learning about the different sounds birds make, and how to interpret them. We did an audio quiz, listening to different calls of five common birds of the area, and then had a great time acting out the different behaviors and corresponding calls like charades while the rest of the class had to guess what was going on.

Thursday we all woke up very early and spread out along the edge of Linne Doran (the pond on the school property) and listened to the bird chorus as the sun rose. Birds are most vocal in the very beginning of the morning, and we were bombarded with songs and calls that we understood after the previous day’s lecture. I had the privilege of observing two Song Sparrow’s hunt for insects at the pond edge and call to each other while they foraged. After we had been out for more than an hour we all reconvened with our clans and drew a map of all the significant bird events we had heard and seen and then compiled the information with the other clans. There is such a wealth of information to be found in the language of the birds!

After drawing our maps we played some games dealing with intuition. Some people believe our actions and reactions are always influenced by our intuition. The problem is many of us are unconscious of this intuitive force in ourselves and don’t quite know how to interpret this intuition even if we can locate it within. We played some games that allowed us to practice listening to our intuition, for example, during one game everyone found a partner and one of the pair put on a blindfold. After making some kind of connection the sighted person moved somewhere else in the room, and the blindfolded person had to then find their partner. It was amazing to see how some people just got up and moved exactly to where their partner had gone. What was even more interesting was talking afterwards about the different feelings and sensations that guided people to their partners. Some people felt tingling in their hands, some people followed an orb or line of light, others felt heat on their body in the direction of their partner! I’m not used to paying attention to intuitive information, but it was exciting to see a little bit of what is possible if we knew how to understand that part of ourselves!

On Friday we talked about native methods of teaching and mentoring. What stood out for me this day was the beginning exercise we did when we were asked to think back to our childhood and remember a time when we were having a blast and laughing really hard. Everyone shared their memory, and most of the memories took place outside. We organized all of the memories into categories, ie. Jumping off things, Catching things, Mud, etc. and the rest of the day centered around the idea that children like doing these things because they know what they need to learn best. We talked about how to incorporate and use these “Child’s Passions” in an educational setting. We did a bunch of activities and played many games that allowed us to really understand how to allow children to have significant and meaningful experiences in nature. Next week we’ll put the ideas to practice when we spend a day with the youth school! We can’t wait!

–Dana

NatureSkills.com's Wilderness Survival Skills Blog

November 8, 2006 13:03 - A day with the kids!

Wow! Another week has already past! We only have two more weeks before we break for Thanksgiving…I can’t believe how fast this year is going by; we must be having fun or something;-)

So, last week our class divided up into two groups, one of which went to school on Wednesday while the other group had the day off, and then the reverse happened on Thursday. The reason for this was because we were spending the days with the youth school kids (aged 7 to 12) and helping them to build their first shelters in the woods. Youth school occurs on both days so we split up in order to spend time with both groups.

Spending the day with youngsters in nature was a great, energetic experience. I ended the day with much more energy than I had begun it. The shelters were by no means completed in the amount of time we had (after story time, snack time, newt-observing time, and lunchtime were subtracted :-) but we had fun gathering leaves and dead fern fronds, sticks, and assembling as much as we could before the day was up.

The kids kept us occupied as we helped them construct their shelters with fantastic stories about families of deer coming to stay in our shelters and keep us warm and make the other children jealous. It was incredibly refreshing to see so many kids running through the trees, falling flat on their bellies in plush ferns, climbing vine-maple trees to shake leaves onto the ground, and working together to build a place in the woods to hang out! This is the future!

On Friday we spent the day indoors learning about cordage. We learned how to process dried stinging nettle stalks into fibers and use the fibers into cord that none of us could break with our bare hands! We also played around with other fibers like raffia, dogbane (Indian Hemp), and Cedar bark! Alexia also brought wool and a foot-treadle spinning wheel to show us how to spin wool into yarn and taught us how to use a drop spindle too!

Stay tuned for next week’s mystery trip to the East side of the Cascades!

Peace!

–Dana

NatureSkills.com's Wilderness Survival Skills Blog

November 11, 2006 19:43 - Here is another shot of cordage making.

Clint demonstrates the focus it requires to process and make cordage out of stinging nettle.

–Filip
NatureSkills.com's Wilderness Survival Skills Blog

November 11, 2006 19:44 - Another photo from this week at Pt. Defiance zoo.

Maraya the gyrfalcon gobbles down a mouse with such speed that even her keeper is surprised.

–Filip
NatureSkills.com's Wilderness Survival Skills Blog

November 15, 2006 18:26 - Flood!

Hey ya’ll

Last week here in Washington we had some serious 50 to 100 year level flooding! Water pretty much filled up the whole valley here and all roads out of Duvall were blocked for two days. Thankfully everyone I’ve heard/know about here is safe, and for that we are all truly grateful.

The flooding meant our trip to the east side of the Cascades was canceled L about which we were all very disappointed. Class on Wednesday and Thursday was also canceled. On Friday we piled into our trusty school vans and headed south to a place called Northwest Trek, a wildlife rehabilitation center and preservation area where we were going to study native North American mammals. Unfortunately, upon arriving we learned that the high winds had taken down a fence around the wolf area and the place had also lost power so they closed the park.

Instead we visited the ­Point Defiance Zoo and spent the rest of the day wandering around in the rain observing the small selection of creatures kept there. One of the coolest things I saw was a beautiful black-spotted, white Gyrfalcon. It was about the size of a Red Tail Hawk but lives mainly up north in Alaska (thus it’s white plumage) and can fly up to 160 miles per hour!

Thankfully our east side trip was rescheduled for the following week, so we are anticipating three awesome full days of exploring and adventuring in a different environment. I’ll have more interesting stories for you all next week I’m sure!

–Dana

NatureSkills.com's Wilderness Survival Skills Blog

November 20, 2006 15:05 - Tracking in Eastern Washington

Two muscular bighorn sheep rams in the Yakima River canyon keep a
wary eye out for danger.

Four excited rez students track and explore the dark sands of the Potholes
area dunes of eastern Washington.

–Filip
NatureSkills.com's Wilderness Survival Skills Blog

November 22, 2006 10:11 - The Eastside Trip (Finally!)

Well, we finally made it to the east side of the Cascades! It was amazing to watch scenery change on our way there. We started out in wet, cloudy Washington and drove up into the mountains where all the trees became basically one type of evergreen (sorry…I didn’t have the forethought to ID them!) with snow covering all the branches and most of the ground! Then we descended the other side and the landscape slowly turned desert with flat open expanses of small sagebrush, rabbit brush and tumbleweed. It was such a relief to be able to walk off into the wilderness without needing to duck and scramble and climb over a massive overload of vegetation (though that has it’s merits too). The views were incredible.

Our first stop was at the Yakima Cultural Center, a small museum depicting the lives of the “River People” that lived in the area and created their lives from much that the Columbia River offered. We learned about the different materials the natives used for tools, clothing, food, shelter and celebration, which lent a lot of depth to our following experiences outside when we came across the same materials in their natural setting!

The next day we drove to a beautiful area known as the Potholes. This is a sandy landscape dotted with many little bodies of water, remnants from the last ice age. Here we split up into our clans again and went out for a day of tracking and trailing. One clan found a stand of dogbane (one of the strongest North American natural fibers) and a complete beaver skull. My clan saw a number of interesting things, including a hawk missing the middle of its tail feathers, a group of California Quail that provided us with some extra fresh tracks, but the best part of all was that we actually caught up with a coyote we were trailing for most of the day! We saw it two times, and it was a really excellent lesson in keeping our heads up as we followed the tracks, because if Dillon hadn’t been looking ahead the first time we saw it, I doubt any of us would’ve seen it at all!

We spent our last night along Umtanum Creek, arriving there after dark. It was really cold, but we made a big fire and shared what had happened in our clans during the day, cooked a warm meal and went to bed. In the morning before we had to start heading back over the mountains, we explored the creek bed and gathered mullein stalks for handrill, aspen wood for bowdrill kits, sage, rabbit brush and mullein leaves for smudge sticks, Pinion Pine needles for basket making, milkweed stalks for cordage and various other assorted things.

Our adventure to the east side was excellent, and a perfect ending before our Thanksgiving break!

–Dana

NatureSkills.com's Wilderness Survival Skills Blog

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