Fifty-two sixth graders from the Gibbon-Fairfax-Winthrop school district got a real taste of conservation of soil, water and wildlife resources in a guided tour by Department of Natural Resources and Redwood and Renville county staff specialists May 26.

“The best way to teach conservation is for students doing the walk through the very habitat as we ‘show-and-tell’ our way along the route,” said Joe Stangel, a Minnesota DNR private lands specialist from Redwood Falls.

Appropriately called a WALK event — which stands for Water, Air, Land Knowledge — these students walked through portions of a 600-acre Minnesota wildlife complex called the Beaver Falls Wildlife Management Area, adjacent to the Minnesota River basin. The complex, open to the public, has wetland restoration ponds, several wildlife and conservation shelterbelts, a few restored prairie grassland areas which have already benefited from several controlled burns, plus a surprising diversity of birds and other species (including an incredible number of wood ticks).

On this particular walk, the students flushed a blue-winged teal from her grassland nest adjacent to a wetland pond. In the nest were nine eggs, perhaps only a few days from hatching, Stangel said, pointing out that this particular mother duck would return to her nest shortly after the students departed.

“We talked about land use, the history of prairie wetlands, watersheds, wind erosion, proper prairie management and the wildlife species that inhabit our prairie habitat,” Stangel said. “We even talk about point and non-point sources of pollution.”

This particular area also has a couple of Reinvest In Minnesota land-use projects, so students were shown how land owners do special things relating to the conservation future of rural Minnesota. Students stood on a retention dike which had created a small wetland pond teeming with vegetative growth, aquatic insects and waterfowl such as Canada geese, mallards, blue-winged teal, red-winged blackbirds, robins, sedge wrens and yellow thrush song birds.

Diane Mitchell, Renville County Water & Hazardous Materials coordinator, used a scale-model typical watershed area involving a small community, farm land, public lands and roads, even a waste-water treatment plant. As students poured water over this miniaturized watershed, they could see exactly what happens to the landscape during and after a heavy thunderstorm.

“We wanted students to see that when water hits the ground, certain things start happening,” Mitchell said. “That water goes somewhere, some into the ground, but some into ditches, tile lines, culverts and, of course, waterways.

“But always when this happens it is now more than just water. It always picks up something from the surfaces it contacts and sometimes that residue material is not good for the watershed downstream. It can carry contaminated wastes, valuable soil or, in some cases, polluted soils, into the ponds, streams, wetlands or, in this case, even the nearby Minnesota River.”

After the two-hour WALK session and its various teaching points along the way, students reassembled for treats and a crossword puzzle test on what they had just experienced.

“Students really enjoy the test. It’s a quick review and gives them something to take home to show their parents,” said Karen Flom, staff member at the Renville County Soil & Water Conservation District office in Olivia.

Examples from the crossword puzzle: 2 Across. Native grasses, tree plantings and wetlands provide wildlife ___. (habitat); 7 Down. Construction sites, plowed fields and lawns are examples of ___ source pollution. (point)

The students' “take-home” folder also included a WALK Word Search, an information sheet “Wetland Functions & Values,” a “100 Ways You Can Improve the Environment” handout, a brochure on starting a home rain garden and information on the 623,105-acre Hawk Creek Watershed which drains land in Chippewa, Kandiyohi and Renville counties through several smaller tributaries into the Minnesota River.

This particular watershed has become a teaching point throughout west central Minnesota since continuous monitoring of the watershed’s streams was started in 1999. The five major pollution problems facing Hawk Creek Watershed are bacteria, phosphorous, total suspended solids, nitrogen and water quantity.

Richard Busse, a sixth-grade teacher at G-F-W, teaches history and uses this annual WALK event to teach his students the history of Minnesota in this part of the state.

“This walking tour gives them a better idea of what used to be,” he said, “and what we now have and how to protect and preserve this environment for future generations.”