The Making of a Meadow : Children Plant Native Grass for Bird Sanctuary

Against the backdrop of space-age office towers, a group of schoolchildren Monday caught a glimpse of the natural world as they planted the beginnings of a meadow in the San Joaquin Wildlife Sanctuary.

About 120 second- and third-grade students from Santiago Hills Elementary School in Irvine eagerly dug into the muddy clay soil of the sanctuary, planting an estimated 1,000 plugs of native California bunch grass in about an hour and a half.

“It’s fun and dirty,” said second-grader Christie Farson, using her hands instead of a trowel to plant the bunches of thin grass sprouts. “This is for a place where the birds can stay.”

In the coming months, sanctuary managers say the grass will grow to cover about three acres of land and will promote a nesting, feeding and migratory stopover for more than 200 species of waterfowl, shorebirds and other birds. More than 20,000 plugs of grass will be planted in all, and volunteers are invited to come to the preserve Saturday at 9 a.m. to finish the work.

Community volunteers recently planted more than 600 native trees and shrubs at the 29.5-acre sanctuary, a series of freshwater ponds found next door to the Irvine Ranch Water District reclamation plant off Michelson Drive. The sanctuary, a former duck hunting club and home to the Sea and Sage chapter of the National Audubon Society, is also next to one of the last major freshwater marshes in Southern California, the 580-acre San Joaquin Marsh.

“We’re restoring the natural habitat of this area,” said Melinda Ching, a parent volunteer who helped organize the

field trip. “This is food for the animals. It encourages migratory birds to come here. With all the development, we have lost much of the habitat.”

The field trip was also part of a schoolwide Developing Social Responsibility Program, designed to help students incorporate civic responsibility into their lives.

Santiago Hills students last fall, for example, collected almost 400 pounds of Halloween candy for an orphanage in Mexico as part of the 3-year-old program, made possible by a grant from the California Educational Initiatives Fund. Other projects have included gleaning local fields of green beans for the hungry, gathering toiletries for the Orange County Rescue Mission and cleaning up Hicks Canyon Wash during Earth Week.

More recently, the students of Santiago Hills teachers Genie Aguilar, Max Cantu, Karen Eckelbarger and Sharon McCubbin have been studying conservation and the environment, which sparked the idea of helping the sanctuary.

“I think this fits in real well,” said Tom Ash, a horticulturist with the county branch of the University of California Cooperative Extension, which along with the Irvine Ranch Water District and other local agencies manage the marsh and sanctuary. “With all the development happening around here, how do we integrate nature into the urban environment?”

During the field trip, the students had a chance to ponder such questions. Much of their trip was spent watching birds and walking along the ponds of the preserve, described in a brochure as “an island in the midst of a thriving urban community.”

For Aguilar, who teaches second- and third-graders at Santiago Hills, the nature preserve has been a favorite place to bring her students for the past 20 years.

“We’ve painted the sunrise and the birds coming,” she said. “It’s kind of like one of those treasures that nobody knows about.”