Reneillio Morrison came to Ohio from Tallahassee to study business at Lourdes University and play on the basketball team.
He expected to possibly encounter challenges dealing with the cold, or the curriculum, or maybe the crowds at away games. But the native of Jamaica never imagined his journey would take him into the river bottom land along Swan Creek, with his 6-foot-5 frame stretched into a pair of chest waders as Morrison took water samples and assessed the environmental health of the area.
"I'm surprised to be standing here, but this is really where you learn how nature works," Morrison said recently after the Seasonal Field Ecology class negotiated a steep bank behind an apartment complex on Eastgate Road to reach the waterway.
"I never dreamed I'd be doing this, but it seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up."
The class, a regular offering at Lourdes, is taught by Sister Marya Czech, a Notre Dame nun who prefers the outdoors to the lecture hall. During the spring semester, the education experience included taking part in bird banding at Black Swamp Bird Observatory, mingling with the walleye fishermen in the Maumee River, and working on a variety of conservation and habitat restoration projects around the region.
"My personal objective for the course is to reveal the wonders of Northwest Ohio's wetlands and waterways, and do so in some new way each time the course is offered," Sister Marya said.
Morrison, who has yet to visit the Okefenokee Swamp relatively close to his home in Florida, or witness the tropical wilderness that is the Everglades in the southern part of the Sunshine State, said the escape from the classroom here is what initially attracted him to the course.
"I'm more of a hands-on type of person, who prefers to experience things as opposed to just reading about something or hearing a speech on it," he said. "Once I saw that this class put you out in the environment a lot, that's all I needed to know."
The most recent group Sister Marya led on a series of adventures was an eclectic collection of city slickers, urban dwellers, farm kids, and nontraditional students. While sharing the glamour of styling in the outdoors world with waders as the primary element in their wardrobe, they quickly coalesced when it came time to examine Swan Creek's flood plain, or take note of the expanse of deer tracks and poison ivy in the area they were working.
"I think we're all attracted to the opportunity a course like this offers to get out and explore a little and have our eyes opened up to what is going on around us," said Jill Hojnacki, a 57-year-old former information technology manager at General Mills.
"I've been all over the world, but one thing I have learned for certain is that right here in the Toledo area we are living in an absolutely unique environment."
Sister Marya, an assistant professor of biology and health sciences at Lourdes, said she encourages students from other areas of study to take the Seasonal Field Ecology class as an elective. There were just two science majors among the group of seven students slogging around the organically rich tiny feeder streams that were pushing recent runoff toward the main artery of Swan Creek.
Christine Boudrie, acting head of the biology and health sciences department at Lourdes, said Sister Marya's course affords students the opportunity to be exposed to the "interrelationships between plants and animals.
"[She] puts her students in touch with our local resources. This is the sort of experience students can study, write, and reflect about -- and remember as a highlight in their college life."
Morrison expects the course to change the way he looks at conservation issues and matters related to the environment.
"You can talk about these kinds of things in the classroom, about how all of these little streams carry good things and bad things into the rivers, but it's easy to zone out when you're just sitting there listening to a lecture on something like that," Morrison said.
"Out here, you see it, you walk around in it, and you experience it. You don't need to look at pictures in a book when you can come down this hill and really explore the land around the river."
Cars continued to pound over the bridge above the group as the water sampling continued and Hojnacki lifted tiny fish with a flat seine she passed through the waters of a narrow, muck-bottomed stream draining the steep hillsides along the river bottom land.
"I guess my hope is to come out of a class such as this with a much better understanding of things, and then be able to teach people to appreciate it," she said. "It is a little disturbing that so many people here in Toledo have absolutely no appreciation for what they have. The people in those cars up there, I don't think they comprehend what's all involved with the world down below that bridge."
Contact Blade outdoors editor Matt Markey at: mmarkey@theblade.com or 419-724-6068.
First Published May 13, 2012, 5:01 a.m.
