NATURE CENTERS

22 January 2010
Cibolo Nature Center
Boerne, Texas

Tour - Cibolo Nature Center:

Caroline Chipman Evans began our visit with an introduction to the Center’s staff, and a tour of the Center’s buildings, including a 1900-era structure moved to the site from downtown Boerne, and a recent $2.5 million addition designed by noted San Antonio green architects, David Lake and Ted Flato.  She also showed us the restored 20-acre tallgrass prairie, the marsh, and the bald-cypress lined stretch of Cibolo Creek.   The prairie was restored through prescribed burning eliminating mowing, and banned off-road driving.  The cypress survived the 7-year drought of the 1950s due to sewage effluent flows down the Creek from the Boerne wastewater plant.  Scouts have built a marsh bridge and interpretive playground close to the Creek.  Horses are ridden on trails through the Center’s grounds. 

Presentation - Audubon Texas Nature Centers:

After we returned to the Center meeting room, Bob Benson gave the first presentation.  Mr. Benson has worked in conservation for 17 years, with development positions at Bat Conservation International, Ducks Unlimited, and the Texas Nature Conservancy.  He has led Audubon Texas, a chapter of the National Audubon Society, as executive director for 15 months.  He described Audubon’s mission as “conservation through environmental education”, and then outlined its history and organization.  National Audubon was formed in 1905 over concerns about the illing of egrets, herons and other wading birds for the millinery trade.  Audubon now has 450 chapters, 24 state offices, 45 nature centers, 500,000 members and 1.6 million magazine readers. 

In Texas, Audubon manages 18 coastal islands for the Texas General Land Office.  The network of islands consists of 13,000 acres that host the rookeries for 90% of Texas’ coastal colonial waterbirds.  Some of these nesting waders are endangered, such as the reddish egret, which has 1200 pairs on Green Island.  

Audubon Texas has several programs underway.  There is a Quail Initiative that is seeking to improve upland prairie habitat on 2 million acres controlled by over 100 private landowners, including the King Ranch.  Audubon also manages the Christmas Bird Count, Soundscape Science program, and the Careers in Conservation Internship effort.  Audubon Texas is not involved much in policy work, in comparison with more active offices in New York state and elsewhere.

Mr. Benson then focused on Audubon Texas’ three nature centers, which include Dogwood Canyon and Trinity River, both to the south of Dallas, and Mitchell Lake, south of San Antonio.  Dogwood Canyon Audubon Center is sited on over 270 acres in the northern reaches of the Hill Country, about 16 miles south of Dallas in the town of Cedar Hill, and adjacent to Cedar Ridge State Park.  The nature center building there covers 5000 square feet of space and will offer math, science and critical thinking education for over 5000 school children annually once it opens in early 2011. 

The Trinity River Audubon Center was opened in October 2008 as part of Dallas’ $100 million Trinity River Corridor Project, which sought to secure a 6000-acre bottomland hardwood forest, while protecting against flooding, and at the same time reclaiming a Superfund dump site.  The Center includes a 21,000-square foot building featuring high-efficiency A/C, rainwater collection, a vegetated roof, permeable paving, native plants, a Gold LEED certification, and a design by Antoine Predock meant to resemble a bird in flight.  The Center was visited by 45,000 people in its first year, including 16,000 students.

Iliana Peña, who taught biology at UT-Brownsville, now serves as director of the Mitchell Lake Audubon Center.  She explained that Mitchell Lake had served as the sewage lagoon for the City of San Antonio since effluent was directed to a dammed marsh in 1901.  However, the original marsh had been noted as “Old Duck Lake” on Spanish maps as early as 1764, and has long been an important stopover for migrating birds.  In 1973, the effluent was diverted, and the 600-acre lake and 600 acres of surrounding wetlands were designated by the City as a Wildlife Refuge.  The Mitchell Lake Wetland Society developed the area as a interpreted site, and transferred operation to the Audubon Society in October 2004, due to liability concerns.  Audubon currently leases the area from the San Antonio Water System, and receives 11,000 visitors, including 3700 students, each year.  They are especially proud of the Young Women’s Leadership Academy which started in summer 2009 to teach 4^th through 6^th grade girls in science, in compliance with the TEKS curriculum.

Bob Benson said that there were plans for a Sheldon Lake Audubon Center, northeast of Houston.  Originally the site for a fish hatchery, the facility was slated for a three-year upgrade.  One half of the $6 million cost has been raised.  OOne of the first improvements will be a 4-story viewing tower on the site.

Comments, Questions and Answers

C: One funder noted that his Trust had given for bussing Austin ISD students to a museum, and had been struck by how transportation was often the key hurdle to getting more exposure of kids to off-campus facilities, and how cost-effective it was to simply pay for the transport.  Ms Peña agreed that getting children to the site was often the major problem, more that the cost of admission fees.

Q: What is the current status of the Sabal Palm Grove Sanctuary in Brownsville?  Evidently it had been closed due to the construction of the US/Mexico border fence across its entrance road.  Mr. Benson confirmed that the 557-acre Preserve that Audubon had established in 1972, had been recently closed.  However, Audubon was developing a memorandum of understanding with the Fish and Wildlife Service for joint management of the Sabal Palm Grove site.  The Service has built up a protected 100,000-acre riparian corridor upstream of the Sanctuary, so the agency has a clear stake in the Audubon preserve’s success.  This MOU would include reopening visitation to the Sanctuary, ensuring periodic flooding of its resacas, and construction of fire breaks.  The Rabb House, a turn of the century building on the Sanctuary grounds, is under renovation.

Presentation – Cibolo Creek Nature Center:

Carolyn Chipman Evans, the executive director of the Cibolo Nature Center, spoke next and began by describing the Center’s history.  She explained that she had grown up in the area, as a member of the Herff family that had once owned much of the land around the Center, later converted to the Boerne City Park.  When she visited the Park in 1988 with her young children, she was shocked to see the deterioration of the site, with trash in the marsh, automobile ruts in the former prairie, and water pollution in the Creek. 

Determined to change things, she recruited some local friends to clean up the site, and gradually evolved into using the place as an education facility, and as a springboard for protecting land throughout Kendall County.  One of her first allies was a Boerne High School teacher who was frustrated with a stale biology textbook, and so required trips to learn from and volunteer at the site.  His students built board walks, installed bird feeders, cleaned the marsh, and planted trees.  The Center initiated “Wild Wednesdays” and pulled in more students, ultimately attracting 5000 students per year.  The Center also started to appeal to adults, and now can rely on 300 volunteers and a staff of 13.  Foundations also pitched in with financial support, or at least, encouragement.  Non-profits, such as the Nature Conservancy, and agencies, such as Texas Parks and Wildlife and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, have also been good partners.

With time, Ms Chipman Evans realized that the Center could not succeed as a small island of protection.  Since there was no local Sierra or Audubon chapter to press for environmental protection, the Center took the lead on opposing ill-considered bridges, sewer plants, and developments.  The Center also became involved in historic conservation, by taking on negotiations, and debt, to purchase the 62-acre Herff farm and homestead, dating to 1852, and now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.  In addition to buying the Herff farm outright, the Center has created the Cibolo Land Conservancy to pursue fee simple and easement acquisitions throughout the Cibolo Creek watershed and the larger Hill Country.

In developing the Center, Ms Chipman Evans realized that there were few resources to look to for guidance.  She had only been able to find an Audubon manual from 1960, which was quite dated (recommending that a nature center organizer “first get a good group of men together”!).  As a board member of the Association for Nature Centers, she realized that there were many others like her who could also use guidance, so she and her husband, Brent Evans, wrote a book on organizing a center.  The University of Texas published their book in 1998, entitled “The Nature Center Book: How to Create and Nurture a Nature Center in your Community”.  She noted that the interest in nature centers has grown still more since then as worry over “nature deficit disorder”, of the need to trade “screen for green”, to let kids explore and reconnect with the outdoors, has also increased.

Ms Chipman Evans concluded by summarizing the accomplishments of the Cibolo Nature Center, which she saw as:

1)      providing an outdoor classroom to thousands of children each year, including inner-city kids;

2)      saving wild places where kids could play, historic places that would remind us of our heritage, and habitat for animals;

3)      building trails throughout Boerne for recreation and outdoor time;

4)      developing citizen science programs to train the public and to better understand natural resources; and

5)      simply staying afloat during financially hard times.

Brent Evans, Ms Chipman Evans’ husband, and the co-founder of the Cibolo Nature Center, spoke next.  He is a social worker with three decades’ experience in the mental health field. He believes that people are now exhibiting standard caged zoo animal problems of aggression, hoarding, and immune system breakdown. He sees a connection between peoples’ crowding and isolation from nature and their anger and frustration.  In that sense, he thinks that nature centers can be key in restoring a community’s mental health.

Mr. Evans also believes that a nature center is more than just a collection of trails and facilities, but is a key to community organizing, of being a resource to different parts of the neighborhood, much like the Chamber of Commerce, schools, police, and other local institutions.  As examples, he told about how nursing home residents recalled how to plant a flower, and make a gift to a loved one, or how psychiatric patients could find serenity in nature and accomplishment in restoration work, or how probationers could gain respect and responsibility by volunteering at the Center, or how teenagers could simply find a place for a cheap date, or how children of divorce could find a place of calm. 

Mr. Evans agrees with the Lakota saying, “a man’s heart away from Nature becomes hard”.  He worries that we risk losing ourselves if we lose the land. 

He told about the second edition of the book project that he had co-authored with Ms Chipman Evans.  He explained that the book is based on visits that they made to 100 nature centers across the country, ranging from a simple converted bathroom in a small New Mexico town to elaborate urban facilities, such as the 11 centers in Cincinnati.  The National Association for Interpretation, a network of zoos, aquaria, historic and nature centers, published the book in 2004.  The book includes descriptions of sites, staffing, programs, budgets, fundraising strategies, communities, and land management methods.  It has been a big success, and is now being translated into Japanese.  Mr. Evans and his wife plan a trip to Japan to see if it can also be translated into Japanese culture.

Comments, Questions and Answers

C: Group discussion focused on the excess time spent with electronic devices.  A recent study showed that young people spent 7.5 hours daily, on average, with computers, cellphones, ipods and other devices.  Since kids often multi-tasked,  this same research showed that youth effectively spent 11 hours per day, and likely thought about electronic communication even when they weren’t plugged in.  Evidently, many children and adolescents sleep with their cellphones, for fear of missing a message.

Q: What had the Nature Center chosen to keep, and what had they elected to cast off, when financial hard times hit?  Ms Chipman Evans said that they carefully researched all their supplies and services for operating, maintaining and equipping the Center, and made sure that they were getting the best price in all cases.  Also, staff took voluntary salary cuts and the board postponed infrastructure projects (including a fence and a storage building).

Q: Does the Center have an endowment?  Ms Chipman Evans said that the cost of buying the Herff Farm and constructing the nature center building had hit $4.5 million, more than two times over budget, and so their endowment remained small.

Q: Has the Center ever ran into trouble challenging public or private local projects, perhaps angering their supporters?  Ms Chipman Evans said that indeed they had gotten cross-wise with some donors, and in fact had lost support in some cases. 

Q: Is there any state-based network that Cibolo Nature Center is part of?  Mr. Evans said that there was no formal association in the state, but that there were informal subgroups within national organizations, such as the Association of Nature Center Administrators.  Second, the Texas Education Agency had a program directed at informal education providers that was helpful.  Ms Peña agreed, and noted that the TEA was a good backer in the sense of telling schools about the recent mandates for elementary schools to provide time in the field for their students.  Third, Texas Parks and Wildlife  provides “Project Wild” for kids of age 3 to 7, a curriculum for outdoor education, that ties state nature centers, schools, and students together.

Tour- Herff-Rozelle Farm:

Following the meeting, funders visited the recently acquired Herff-Rozelle farm.  The Herff-Rozelle Farm includes a German-style rock, 2-story homestead, with outbuildings (an aviary, barn, doctor’s office, kitchen, and outhouse), in addition to 62 acres of prairie and woodland, that helps preserve the viewshed, a recharge area for the Trinity and Edwards Aquifer, and a wildlife corridor along the Cibolo Creek.