by Donna Swagerty Shreve
In the late 1980s, Lodi Unified’s new superintendent and staff tried to push a much more progressive curriculum model. Being a teacher of GATE students at Henderson made me a target of modeling the new technique. Plus, I was also open to trying new ideas that would engage my students. My topic for this new approach was birds.
I planned to set up an environment to engulf totally the classroom in the world of birds. I always collected items from nature that I thought could be of use in the classroom. A neighbor had given me a hummingbird’s nest she had found. A student the previous year lived in the country and her home had a huge picture window. Birds kept flying into the window and provided me with various examples of birds in the countryside of Lodi area. I had asked her to put the now expired birds in a freezer baggy, freeze them and bring them into me. This was all with her mother’s approval, of course. I ended up with quite a collection. I also found a good supply of owl pellets under a certain tree in our school’s parking lot. One of the activities was to dissect the owl pellets to discover what the owls in our area ate.
During this time period I could still purchase a needle and syringe plus a big bottle of formaldehyde. I would have great difficulties trying to do the same today. With my supplies, I embalmed each specimen I received. My prize model was an owl I named “Stinky.” My husband drove a big rig that delivered to McDonalds. A lot of his driving happened at night when owls are out hunting. Unfortunately for Stinky, John’s truck drove right into his flight path. John realized he had hit an owl and stopped to check. Stinky was still on the grill and seemed in good shape though definitely not to be a threat to any more rodents. John had a bag in his cab and he placed Stinky in the bag and then in his freezer unit. McDonald’s was never the wiser. Stinky was given room in our freezer at home and I waited until I could properly embalm him.
During my summer break, I decided it was time to preserve this owl and give my freezer more room for food we were actually planning to eat. First I placed the owl on our patio picnic table to slowly thaw. This plan was not going to work as the cats were too intrigued and I decided it would take too long to guarantee the best results. I then placed Stinky in the microwave to thaw quicker. Whoops. I did not realize the thawing process would destroy Stinky’s eyes. I finally finished the thawing process and embalmed him with the help of my neighbor who happened to be a high school science teacher. She was much more knowledgeable about various procedures and Stinky was finally preserved. He was a wonderful example of why owls can fly so silently. The under wings have amazing soft feathers that are not found on other parts of his body.
Now that I had my many embalmed birds, I added to the atmosphere with a professional recording of many different birds. Now that I had introduced the world of birds with the various shapes of body, beak and talons plus their distinctive songs, I felt I could hand over the rest of the research to the students.
Each student was to choose some topic that pertained to birds and present it to the class. The presentation was to be in science fair format with trifold boards and any materials that enriched their subject. I was impressed with the results as many of the students obviously spent a lot of time and effort in research.
As a treat towards the end of the unit, I invited a well known birder to speak to the class. David Yee to this day gives birding classes through Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at U.O.P. . David came in and gave a great presentation about the world of birds and introduced and reinforced the variety of birds we have in our area. The students were curious and asked great questions which reinforced their new knowledge about various aspects of birds.
I remember one detail as I was mortified when one student told Mr. Yee that we had a recording of bird calls and could he identify the calls on our recording. David was such a good sport and agreed. He passed this student’s test with flying colors but I was still going to discuss later with this student about being respectful and polite when a guest is invited into our room.
Yesterday, August 15, 2024, I accompanied Mel Corren to a reception for the new season of OLLI at the U.O.P. campus. One of the speakers that introduced one of the class offerings was David Yee. He is again offering birding classes and is going strong. I realized it had been forty years ago that I had bravely asked him to speak to my class. Mel worked the room as he knows so many people in the Stockton area and U.O.P. community. As David was catching up with Mel, I introduced myself and told him how I so appreciated when he had agreed to talk to my class all of those years ago. To my amazement, he remembered my class and his experience with them. Somehow that was so special to me that I recalled what I could of that unit all of those forty years ago. Yes, there is more to the story of Stinky but I will reserve that for another story.
966 words
8/16/2024
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