Into the wild at Clear Creek Natural Heritage Center with Hawk Elementary

“Your eyes can move,” said Betty, a member of the Elm Fork Chapter of the Texas Master Naturalist program. “Owls can’t move their eyes. They have what is called tubular eyes.

“You know how you can keep your head still and look all around? Well, an owl can’t do that, and they have to move their head or their body to be able to see.”

The Hawk students are riveted, peering through their cardboard tubes. Unlike owls — who can hear the heartbeat of their next meal even under a foot of snow (as they fly high in the air) — the second graders creep closer to Betty. Finally, a student spies the plastic mouse the Master Naturalist tucked into the grass under the tree.

On Monday, Hawk’s second graders boarded school buses to make the trip to Denton’s Clear Creek Natural Heritage Center. Once they got to the 3,000-acre bottomland forest, the students broke into groups.

They took turns learning about snakes, bees, North Texas animals that live in and around the preserve (and their scat, which made more than one second-grade boy laugh). Then they took turns outside, where they took in Betty’s owl presentation, played a “predator-prey” game and went on a hike.

“The hike is the most important thing we’re doing today,” said Elise Spain, a member of the Elm Fork Master Naturalist chapter and a coordinator for the Denton ISD field trip. “We have kids here this morning who have never been on a hike.”

Betty is a founder of the Denton ISD Days at Clear Creek program. She, with city officials and colleagues at Denton ISD, started small during the 2005-06 school year, while she was working as the science coordinator for Denton ISD. The idea was to show students that not only can they study science outside of the classroom, they can have fun with it.

“Everything that we do out here is tied to their [Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills],” Betty said. “So we’re going to use their TEKS to write the curriculum. But I think the bigger picture of what’s really more important is the feeling they get about science. And you know, I always say kids will never remember the things we teach them when they get out of high school. They don’t. But they’re going to remember this. They’re going to remember how they feel about science. And we want them to have a good day out here in nature.”

Betty said that, over the years, the Master Naturalists developed their expertise — volunteers who love bees became experts in bees, and bird lovers studied and learned as much as they could about North Texas birds — and now teach the second and fourth graders who come each year about their subjects.

During the snake session, one girl recoiled as Sharon Barr held out the shed skin of a local snake to teach about scales. As Barr spoke and turned the cloudy-white snakeskin this way and that, the girl relaxed.

“Really? That’s like my fingernails?” she whispered to the girl next to her, as Barr explained that the tissue of the scales was made up of hardened keratin, just like the students’ finger and toenails.

Robin Brownell, the principal at Hawk Elementary, watched as her students discovered new things, like how some bees don’t live in hives. And how honeybees die after they sting.

Brownell said the day at the nature center sticks with her students.

“Now, when they go out for recess, they start looking at things a little bit in a different lens,” she said. “And then they’ve talked about things like this and they notice it on the playground. They’ll say, ‘We saw this insect that we saw on the hike,’ and some other things. Some of the students have never seen poison ivy before. They have now.”

Back at Betty’s station, little noses wrinkle when she explains that owls have two stomachs, but they can’t digest the bones and claws of the mice they eat. So they regurgitate them in a mass that’s called a pellet. One boy slowly covers his mouth and nose when Betty explains that naturalists and museums can buy cleaned pellets for educational purposes.

“But you have to be careful, because they are full of bacteria,” she said. “And you can break them open, but they smell really, really bad.”

Pellets and their smells might make some kids cringe. But overall, they think owls are pretty cool. One boy turns to another as they head to the next lesson. Betty just told them about an experiment where scientists placed an owl in a massive room, turned out the lights and released a mouse. In seconds, Betty said, the owl swooped from its perch to grab its next meal.

“I want to be an owl,” the boy said. “I would fly and catch a rat like this!” Whersh!