Wedged between a railroad line, busy Havana Street and the Denver/Adams county line, has ducks, herons, deer, muskrats, foxes, coyotes, snakes, hawks and a resident owl.
And — on a recent, brisk, fall morning — fourth-graders.
About three days each week, grade-school students stroll the trails at the 123-acre wildlife preserve, learning about the function of wetlands and other environmental topics on field trips that cost many of their urban, underserved schools almost nothing. A private donor even picks up the lion’s share of the bus fare.
The center — the former buffer zone between Stapleton Airport and its surrounding neighborhoods — is applying for Season to Share funds to help pay for the field trips and its other educational programs.
The girls from Kenton School bounce up and down at the possibility of seeing a coyote. “Will we see a bear?” asks a boy.
“Well, we’ve never seen a bear here, but it’s not impossible,” hedges volunteer guide Randy Kumm.
“I want to go to the ocean and see fossils,” says Adrian, 9. Why? “Because they’re really old,” he explains.
But one of the first creatures the kids encounter this day is an iconic Colorado bird: a magpie, perched on a log at the edge of the cattail-thick marsh surrounding Bluff Lake. “Ooh, look at the bird!” a few of them cry.
As the kids use the center’s binoculars to ogle the shoreline and one another, Kumm asks what kind of animals might live in the lake and marsh.
“Toads!”
“Turtles!”
“Snapping turtles!”
“Crocodiles!”
Kumm tells them that decades ago, he and his boyhood pals would come to the lake to catch “A salamander is an amphibian,” he says.
a student asks.
When the kids’ attention strays, fourth-grade teacher Lynn Hartmann helps redirect it to information they’ll need for the essay they’ll write the next day on . But when Kumm asks whether their school has microscopes, Hartmann shakes her head.
“Some of these kids have never been to the mountains, never been outside their little neighborhoods,” she says. “I love their excitement. I love the curiosity of their minds. We’re very fortunate that Bluff Lake is here.”
Because the preserve is below grade, it was battered when September’s floods scoured Aurora. Sand Creek swelled, merged with the tiny lake and ripped out about 100 trees. But most of the trash and debris that washed in is now gone, thanks to hundreds of hours of volunteer help.
And no trash is in evidence at the marsh.
There, as the students lie down to peer between gaps in the deck into the water, one girl is dissecting a cattail blade with her fingernails.
“There’s, like, lines in here!” she exclaims.
“What do you think those lines are for?” Kumm asks.
“Um, to hold water?” the girl says.
“Answers should lead you to more questions,” Kumm says. “That’s science.”
Susan Clotfelter: 303-954-1078, sclotfelter@ denverpost.com or twitter.com/susandigsin
Bluff Lake Nature Center
3400 Havana Way, blufflakenaturecenter.org
In operation since: 1994
Number served last year: 3,300 in youth programs
Staff: 2.5
Yearly budget: $230,000
Percentage of funds directly given to clients and services: 76 percent
