Mr. Walbridge and Mrs. Brehm's Honors Biology students collected enough seeds to plant eight acres of prairie which will be used to plant native prairie vital for migratory birds, including Sandhill cranes, who stop to rest in the Central Platte River Valley during their migration each year. Photo courtesy of Crane Trust Director Amy Sandeen.
HHS Honors Biology students picked enough seeds to plant eight acres of prairie during their field trip to the Crane Trust Nature and Visitor Center on October 1.
Students attended classes in the morning and were dismissed from school at 11 a.m. Once they arrived at the Crane Trust, they had a picnic at the Crane Trust outdoor seating and on picnic blankets before going inside to listen to a presentation about the Crane Trust’s conservation efforts and what the students would be doing once they got to the prairie conservation area.
“My favorite part of the trip was getting to pick the seeds. (The field trip) was very fun, and I really enjoyed it a lot,” sophomore Timberlyn Foster said. “It was a very good experience.”
After arriving at the prairie, students split into groups of three to four students. An intern from the Crane Trust then assigned the groups to a plant and showed them how to harvest the seeds.
“I liked picking the milkweed because it just felt like we were in a movie. Like we were singing, we were having fun, and it was also bettering the environment,” sophomore Sophia Reynolds said. “We picked a lot of acres of milkweed so they could redistribute it, so it was fun.”
The students also saw the Crane Trust’s bison herd before heading back to the school.
“And so they’ve also reintroduced bison to those native prairies to complete that ecosystem flow of like the bison eating the grass and the manure fertilizing the grass and all of the flowers that are used for the pollinators that brings insects which the cranes eat,” Honors Biology teacher Abby Brehm said. “So there’s kind of like the whole food web now that they’ve established that area for conservation.”
The field trip gave the Honors Biology classes a more hands-on opportunity to learn about topics they have been covering in class, such as biodiversity and human impacts as well as new information they haven’t covered in class yet.
“It helped me to understand our topics better because we had been talking about milkweed in science. Like I got firsthand experience of what I saw on paper, and now I actually got to go pick the milkweed,” Reynolds said.
Reynolds enjoyed the field trip overall, including that the students got to spend time outside.
“It was really fun, and our leader was really nice,” Reynolds said. “We went on a long walk and just got to enjoy nature. Like, yeah, better than being cooped up in a classroom all day.”
Aside from this year, Brehm took HHS Honors Biology students on the field trip in 2022. Brehm knew Josh Weiss, the Crane Trust range manager, from college, which is how the idea for the field trip first began.
“I think that it’s a good way to get people to recognize the Crane Trust and what they do for conservation in Nebraska, and how important our ecoregion, like the ecosystems in Nebraska, are for the entire world,” Brehm said. “Also, it being a migratory route for the crane, I think a lot of people just take that for granted and don’t really know much about it. So I hope (the field trip) continues, and I think it will, as long as we keep a good relationship with Crane Trust.”
