By Jan Fenwick, honored for 25 years of service, continues to inspire budding student marine biologists

By Elizabeth Cloutman and Sara Ballenger

Town Crier Staff Writers

A stiff, cold wind blew across San Francisco Bay last Wednesday morning as Jan Fenwick knelt down and reached to pluck a mussel from beneath the dock at the Baylands Nature Preserve in Palo Alto.

“I want you to pass this around and feel the threads,” Fenwick said to a group of eager third-grade students from Encinal School in Atherton, whom she was guiding on their field trip to the preserve. “That’s how (the mussel) attaches to the dock. There is a lot of little life growing on here.”

Shortly thereafter, all of Karen Strohmaier’s students were lying on their stomachs, looking fervently for mussels along with Fenwick, despite the chill from the strong gusts.

As a member of Environmental Volunteers for the past 25 years, Fenwick has led thousands of San Mateo and Santa Clara county elementary students on field trips to area preserves and parks.

Fenwick was honored by the organization at its April 26 annual meeting.

“She is just a dynamo,” said Allan Berkowitz, executive director. “She is always willing to volunteer for various projects.” Berkowitz said Fenwick plays a “central role” on the group’s development committee and is responsible for a “significant amount of fund-raising.”

Environmental Volunteers is a Palo Alto-based non-profit organization, founded in 1972 to promote an understanding of and responsibility for the environment through hands-on science education. Each of its 165 volunteer has gone through either a semester-long training program or a month-long series of training sessions on a specific topic, such as marine or foothill ecology, neighborhood nature and water conservation.

A former elementary teacher, who first became active in Environmental Volunteers when her own children were in school, the Los Altos Hills resident remains enthusiastic about her work for the organization. While she has devoted more time in recent years to administrative and fund-raising activities for Environmental Volunteers, she still conducts one or two classroom field trips per week for a few months each year.

“It was so appealing to me to work with kids. I’m always learning and it’s something I believe in,” she said. “We have a special environment here. Hopefully, (the program) leads students to stewardship (of nature) in the future.”

Before visiting the Baylands preserve, Strohmaier’s students spent 90 minutes exploring learning stations in their classroom, provided by Environmental Volunteers, Fenwick said. Stations included stuffed birds, accompanied by information about their feeding habits and adaptations; Bay fish, how they breathe and sleep; and “What Lives in Bay Mud?”

On the two-hour field trip, Fenwick also pointed out the songs and habits of the birds the students heard or saw in flight as well as other animal and plant life in the salt marshes of the Baylands Preserve.

That many of the preserves’ plants, such as fennel and yellow mustard, are edible was especially exciting to student Joshua Hubert, who sampled a number of them during the field trip.

“A lot of the plants tasted good. The fennel tasted good … a lot like licorice,” he said. “These yellow plants here don’t taste good, but they smell like honey.”

Fenwick’s hope that the Environmental Volunteers program might increase the children’s awareness of and concern for nature proved true for many in Strohmaier’s class. “

This is really good hands-on,” said parent chaperone Lanette Kozlowski. “The science … is really good for them. It kind of opens their eyes.”

Joshua said he plans to return with his mother to the Baylands Preserve … to show her which plants are good to eat.