High school habitats

A week after the groundbreaking ceremony in early May, Ryan Miller's class had almost finished building the habitat. The butterfly bushes were in and the bird feeder was up and had already been visited by several blue jays.

As they planted the last of the flowers, one young woman was in a bit of a panic because she'd forgotten to dilute the plant vitamins before she put them in the soil. She thought her mistake might end up killing the seedlings. Another student calmly advised her to add more water, lots of water, saying maybe that would wash the concentrate away from the roots.

It was just another lesson learned at Central High, in Granite District, where Miller's environmental geography class had spent two terms on this habitat project. Their piece of earth is about 5 feet wide by 100 yards long. It borders the school parking lot on one side and, on the other side, borders a stretch of chain link fences and neighbors' back yards.

The students' goal: to plant several different swaths of grasses, bushes and flowers — to make a place for butterflies, hummingbirds and the threatened North American robin. Their secondary goal: to have their habitat accepted by the National Wildlife Federation as an official Schoolyard Habitat.

The project began last summer when Miller got a fellowship from National Geographic. He went to Washington, D.C., took a course and came back ready to teach his students about grant writing and publicity as well as researching plant species.

Or maybe this habitat project actually began before that. Maybe it began with these students when they were children — naturally attracted to the natural world.

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When you drive up to Pine View High School, on the outskirts of St. George, you find a parking lot surrounded by a bright green lawn. Walking to the front door, you smell a faint odor of weed killer.

You are guessing this is probably not the schoolyard habitat. Sure enough, when someone in the office assigns a student to show you the habitat, the student leads you to the school's back door. There, out behind the greenhouse, is a fenced-in quarter acre containing lots of desert plants, happily blooming in lots of sand.

Here is the cool thing about your student tour guide, one Joshua Barney, age 17: Barney carries a live lizard on his shoulder. The lizard is small and is on a tiny leash. (Most teachers don't mind him bringing his pet to school, Barney says. Those who do ask him to put the pet away. Barney puts the lizard down his T-shirt, and everyone is happy.)

Barney has never actually taken a botany class, never actually walked through the school-owned piece of desert. But he loves the desert, he says. He's been wandering around in the canyons and on the mesas since he was a little boy.