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PrintStewards of the Land
Idaho Master Naturalists give of themselves to help wildlife and wild places
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The breakthrough came with the idea to X-ray dirt. The results will benefit the trumpeter swan, North America’s largest bird and the planet’s largest living waterfowl. Despite its remarkable size, this swan can die by inadvertently consuming just a few pieces of lead shot. The lead winds up in the bird’s gizzard, researchers say, where grinding increases its absorption into tissue and bone, poisoning the swan.
So the Idaho Department of Fish and Game (IDFG) wanted to find out just how much lead shot might be scattered around in the soil at the 1,700-acre Market Lake Wildlife Management Area north of Idaho Falls. A globally important hotspot for waterbirds, Market Lake attracts trumpeter swans along with thousands of ducks, snow geese, tundra swans, and shorebirds. While lead shot is banned for waterfowl hunting, it’s still legal for pheasant hunters, who frequent the uplands around the lake.
To investigate the level of lead present in the soil, the IDFG turned to a relatively new corps of volunteers, members of the Idaho Master Naturalist Program. Launched in 2008, with the first chapter in Island Park, the program now has active chapters in Rexburg, Pocatello, Idaho Falls, Ketchum, Boise, Treasure Valley, McCall, and Sandpoint. The aim is to cultivate a corps of well-informed volunteers, who work as active stewards of Idaho’s natural environment.
In 2010, Idaho Master Naturalists officially logged more than 10,000 hours of volunteer work. Unofficially, they contributed much more, according to Sara Focht, wildlife educator for IDFG, which developed the program and assists the chapters.
“The Idaho Master Naturalist Program has room for all people to get active in conservation,” Focht says, explaining that it fills a gap for the state wildlife agency—which previously had offered many educational opportunities for children and for hunters and anglers, but virtually no services for adults who may not hunt or fish. Idaho is the twenty-sixth state to launch a master naturalist program.
“It’s not a new thing nationwide,” Focht says, “but for us, it’s pretty new.”
Already, the Upper Snake chapter, based in Idaho Falls, has attracted seventy participants. To become a certified master naturalist, participants must attend forty-eight hours of training and complete forty hours of volunteer service. (Training costs range from $55 to $125, depending on the chapter.) That’s a bargain, Focht says, because “you get forty hours of really amazing speakers.” Topics cover everything from bighorn sheep to sustainability to provocative subjects, such as wolves and salmon recovery.
Upper Snake Chapter chairman Roger Piscitella says he often repeats the training, though it’s not required, because the local chapter continually brings in new speakers to discuss different issues.
