(12/2004) - It is the last regular day of fall semester and the students in Rob Gustke’s Colorado natural history class are presenting their final projects. Drawings and natural history essays are casually placed around the classroom for everyone to see. The only sign of nervous jitters form this group of seniors is reluctance to step forward and be the first to present. Gustke leads with his event map, an essay and illustration of a moment in nature, “Shedding The Layers.”

“December is a worn-out month,” he begins with a deliberately sluggish voice as he talks about a large milkweed bug (Lygaeus Kalmii) walking on the wall of the gate in his backyard. “Worn out … is a product of things having run their course,” he continues. “All the oak brush leaves behind the wall are crinkly brown … their photosynthetic chores are done for the year. On the slopes behind, the pinon needles look a dusty green as they quietly hunker down in their stout solidarity.”

In the next 30 minutes, student presentations create snapshots - moments in their lives, interactions with nature – and the landscape changes from the tree outside the Frautschi Campus Center to an aged, twisted juniper near the base of a large rock outcropping, and from the newest lava bed on the island of Hawaii to a river in Wyoming.

It is easy to understand the focus of this science elective class: “To learn more about the settings in which you live by making close observation – that is what my natural history class is all about,” Gustke notes.

In early October, Gustke and his students worked with Claire Walker Leslie, nationally recognized wildlife artist, naturalist, educator and author of seven books including “Keeping a Nature Journal” (co-authored with Charles E. Roth). Gustke met Leslie at a workshop in Massachusetts, and it was a coup that he was able to snatch Leslie away from a book tour to work with FVS students.

During the 1-1/2-day workshop, which included field trips to the front prairie, Garden of the Gods, and Cheyenne Canon, Leslie emphasized the use of drawing as a tool for observing nature. “She was working on basic skills with kids on the prairie, and the big thing she touched upon was the journal capturing the setting – not just what you are sketching, but the surroundings. What is the wind direction, what is the weather like, what phase of the moon is it, what kind of clouds are in the sky, what sounds do I hear?” Gustke relates. “There is great value to learning about how to take inventory of your surroundings, to really know what is there and appreciate it for its physical essence.”

By compiling field journals, trekking through the surrounding prairie to identify, observe, and draw different species – from fungi to beetles – creating a museum-type arthropod, studying and predicting the behavior of a black widow spider, and reading essays by prominent natural historians, students in Gustke’s class learned how to quantify their obvservations and combine objective scientific facts with human creativity.

“This is where the true connection and deeper appreciation can develop,” says Gustke. Indeed, the end-of-term essays indicate that the students learned from zooming in on specifics of a species, be it a painted lady butterfly or a sand sage, but they also began to see nature’s patterns and make greater connections.