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Nick Forster's "Teach Me One Thing" (episode 9) - Oak Thorne
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About Oakleigh Thorne
In a December 2020 episode of Nick Forster's "Teach Me One Thing," Oakleigh Thorne, then 91 and a half, discussed his lifelong commitment to nature education. Thorne described founding the Thorne Ecological Institute, later renamed Thorne Nature Experience, which focuses on children's environmental education. He noted the organization operates a nature preschool for children as young as two and summer camps for older age groups, with bird banding activities for those twelve and over. Thorne emphasized the importance of children playing in nature and learning to identify birds by song, recalling that Frank Trevor at Millbrook School taught students to learn bird songs and associate them with the birds. He recommended resources from the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology and suggested that people can enhance their nature experience by standing still with closed eyes to notice sounds they might otherwise miss.
Transcript (55 segments)
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Nick Forrester0:12
Hi everybody, it's Nick Forrester. This week for Teach Me One Thing, I get to hang out with Oak Thorne, an appropriately named human being who's been committed to the natural sciences literally all his life. He went to the same school that I did, years apart because he's quite a lot older than me. Anyway, Oak Thorne has been a passionate advocate for nature and the natural sciences ever since he was a student there. At that school, he started something called the Thorne Ecological Institute that does environmental education for kids, and he has a particular interest in birds. So Oak is going to talk to us. You can hear some birdsong in the background, so he would know exactly what those are, and I don't. But anyway, here comes Teach Me One Thing with Oak Thorne.
Oak Thorne, great to see you. Let me ask you a personal question: how old are you now?
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Oakleigh Thorne1:43
91 and a half.
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Nick Forrester1:50
91 and a half. And you and I have known each other a long time, right? Our paths are not dissimilar. You grew up in the country on the Great South Bay in Long Island on 60 acres of woods and a lake and streams and meadows.
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Oakleigh Thorne2:04
So I was Nature Boy right from the beginning.
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Nick Forrester2:09
Did you have a good pair of boots when you were little?
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Oakleigh Thorne2:11
No, I just went out in the rain. I suppose I did. Yeah, I think I did. Yeah, I loved building dams in the rain and seeing how water would flow. I learned a lot about the physics of water. It's wild to play when a child is allowed to go out and play in nature. It's very important. It's a very steep rocky philosophy. I think of my youth as being kind of feral. I was just on my own and could play. I had a dog, it was my companion, and I would just muck around in the swamps and fields and ponds and barns and such. That's why I play. That's important.
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Nick Forrester2:50
Yeah. And then you and I both went to the same school, although not at the same time, Brooks School, which is famous for community service and natural sciences and the zoo and the bird banding program. Frank Trevor set all that up, right?
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Oakleigh Thorne3:04
Yeah, the Trevor Zoo today is an accredited zoo. It's quite a facility.
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Nick Forrester3:14
Have you been there recently?
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Oakleigh Thorne3:16
I haven't. It's amazing. They've got quite a few different buildings and they have some endangered species like red pandas and some... I haven't been there in 50 years.
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Nick Forrester3:26
Yeah, it's true. The Trevor Zoo is quite a facility. What's so intriguing is that you continued with this theme through Millbrook, then you went to Yale, and now it's 60... what is it, 65, 66 years?
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Oakleigh Thorne3:42
66 years. Thorne Ecological, we changed the name from Thorne Ecological to Thorne Nature Experience about 10 years ago. We're doing entirely children's environmental education now.
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Nick Forrester4:00
That's so important. It was important in 1954 as well. One of the things that I think you've done such a good job of is you've affected the scale in which young people can experience the beauty and wonder of the natural world by bringing it down and localizing it and making it tangible and physical for them.
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Oakleigh Thorne4:28
Yeah, because getting out and actually having contact with nature is what does the trick. That's really what captures it. That's why bird banding is so great, because they're handling wild birds.
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Nick Forrester4:41
How do you catch the wild birds?
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Oakleigh Thorne4:43
We have traps at the office that have seed, and they stay open like bird feeders, and they have a solenoid mechanism so I can push a button and close the trap and catch it. But otherwise we use mist nets, and we particularly band a lot of cliff swallows because they nest under road culverts, and you can drop the net down and catch 20 or 30 at a time.
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Nick Forrester5:07
Do you have to do that at a certain time of day?
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Oakleigh Thorne5:09
No, although we do it from 8:00 in the morning till noon usually. And cliff swallows... when you have a group of kids and you catch 20 or 30 cliff swallows, do the kids help take them out of the net and all that?
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Nick Forrester5:24
Oh yeah, they have to learn to take them out of the net. Sometimes it takes them a long time and they need a little help at first, but they get very good at it. Within a week they're professionals.
What's the youngest kids that you take on?
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Oakleigh Thorne5:40
They have to be at least 12. So they're usually 12, 13, 14, not even 15 or 16, but yeah, 12 to 15 usually.
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Nick Forrester5:50
And for many, this is probably their first chance to be around, certainly to handle a live bird or something like that, right?
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Oakleigh Thorne5:58
Right, right. That's why they'll often come back and take the course two or three years in a row because they love it that much.
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Nick Forrester6:07
Yeah. And so we live in an era where there is a generation of kids who don't get much contact with nature, unfortunately.
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Oakleigh Thorne6:17
Yes, that's what we try and counter.
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Nick Forrester6:22
So for a lot of your kids, is it the first time they've ever been walking around in a swamp or a pond or bullrushes or whatever?
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Oakleigh Thorne6:28
Yeah, but we start young. We have a nature preschool, and we'll start with kids who come with a parent when they're two years old. Then when they're three or four, they can be in the preschool. In the summer camp, the youngest is five or six, so we'll have courses for five to eight year olds or six to eight year olds, and then ones from nine to eleven year olds, and then twelve and over. The bird banding is twelve and over.
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Nick Forrester7:04
Well, let me just ask you a question. I'm a guy who grew up in the country and has spent a lot of time in nature, but I don't think of myself as particularly educated, certainly around birds. I'm very uneducated, as you well know. So what can you teach me that will enhance my experience as a person who goes around outside, and what can I share with people who might bump into this program?
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Oakleigh Thorne7:31
Well, I guess getting you out and hearing the bird songs at this time of year and then identifying the bird. Frank Trevor was really good at that at Millbrook School, having us learn the song and the bird. So we'd hear the song, we'd say, 'Oh, that's a yellow warbler,' and we'd go find it, and sure enough it was a yellow warbler. So it was the music of the bird song that was imprinted on you early on, the music of nature.
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Nick Forrester8:07
So are there some birds that I, living here in Colorado, can try to recognize? Because I don't know any bird songs other than a mourning dove. I know that's a sad song. What bird song can I learn?
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Oakleigh Thorne8:32
How about a crow? Or a raven? A raven sounds like a horse crow.
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Nick Forrester8:42
A horse crow? Crow with a horse stroke? I see. Crow and raven, that's cool. But are there some... what's the most beautiful bird song that you like to hear when you're out and about these days?
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Oakleigh Thorne8:53
I love the sound of a meadowlark.
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Nick Forrester8:56
A meadowlark. I know I can't whistle well. I'll find a recording of it. Are those things that I could hear near where I live?
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Oakleigh Thorne9:19
Probably not right in town. They like to be out where there are open meadows, east of town, like out at Sombrero Marsh. We have a couple of meadowlarks that sing.
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Nick Forrester9:31
But in general, are those bird songs things you can hear online? You can just say 'I want to hear the meadowlark call' and then Google that?
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Oakleigh Thorne9:39
Yeah, there's some great things. The Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology put out some great things. There are several apps you can get for bird songs and birds. You can describe the bird, like 'this yellow and how big it is,' and it'll show you what the possibilities are.
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Nick Forrester10:00
So the idea is, using some technology, I can probably start to identify both birdsong and birds that I see.
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Oakleigh Thorne10:09
Absolutely. And much like the celebrated but misjudged ornithologist in Central Park last week, it's a beautiful thing to get out and really pay attention to the birds. I think it invites the kind of connection to nature that a lot of people miss.
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Nick Forrester10:24
Absolutely. And interestingly enough, Central Park in New York City is an incredibly good bird migration place because it's a green oasis, and the birds tend to land there. There's a lot of water. Most of them migrate at night, and then as it starts getting light, they come down and land wherever there's a nice green inviting area, which is usually Central Park.
All right, so what I'm going to take away from this is that I need to try to at least identify a couple of different bird songs and then try to pair the bird song with the image of what bird is making that sound. And if I can do that with even two birds, that's going to be very telling and a real revelation for me.
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Oakleigh Thorne11:16
Absolutely. Frank Trevor was good that way. He would send us out and tell us if we heard a song to try to find the bird and identify it. But very often he would be with us and he'd help us, but then he'd like us to just go out on our own and make that discovery. This was long before any of these apps and recordings.
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Nick Forrester11:45
So lastly, tell me a little bit about the meditative nature of the importance of listening.
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Oakleigh Thorne11:52
What I often do with a group of kids is go down to the bird blind or just anywhere out in nature, have them stand and close their eyes for a minute. And it's amazing when you do that how quickly your ears start picking up sounds that you hadn't noticed before.
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Nick Forrester12:13
Yeah. In this time of social distancing, this is a really good thing to get involved with: go out in nature and shut the hell up and listen.
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Oakleigh Thorne12:27
That's good. Even in conversation, isn't it, to learn to listen. It's good in music too.
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Nick Forrester12:34
Yeah. Playing music, well of course you're a singer from the Wizard Oil Singers, right? And you play jazz piano too. You're a wonder. Well listen, I really appreciate you spending some time with me today, and I learned something that's going to be useful to me right away.
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Oakleigh Thorne12:56
Well, start learning birds because it's something you can always enjoy: bird watching and bird listening.
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Nick Forrester13:04
All right, well thank you, Oak Thorne. I really appreciate the time. I'll make sure that people, if they want to find out how to reach you, Thorne Nature.org is that what it is?
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Oakleigh Thorne13:13
OakThorneNature.org.
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Nick Forrester13:16
OakThorneNature.org. You've got one of the most natural sounding names for somebody who's been involved in the natural world as long as you have.
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Oakleigh Thorne13:29
Yeah, I get teased about that a lot. 'Oh, you made that up.' But I know the legacy. You're not the first Oak Thorne.
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Nick Forrester13:43
All right, well listen, thank you so much for being on Teach Me One Thing. I really appreciate it.
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Oakleigh Thorne13:47
Thanks, Nick. I enjoyed it. It's always good to spend time with you.