Children get off their gadgets at Irvine Ranch Conservancy

The sixth-grader figures he spends two to three hours a day watching YouTube videos and playing games on his smartphone.

“My dad makes me go outside,” says Harvey Cendejas, “so I won’t go blind.”

Harvey, 11, who attends Mendez Fundamental Intermediate School in Santa Ana, did his father proud on April 21 by barely touching his phone during an Earth Day weekend outing with a couple of dozen fellow members of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Central Orange Coast.

Instead of staring into the screen of his cell phone, Harvey saw hummingbirds dance around cobweb thistle at the Irvine Ranch Conservancy’s Native Seed Farm on Jeffrey Road in North Irvine, spotted the tiny red speck of the “Big A” at Angel Stadium from a panoramic viewpoint along Loma Ridge, and looked for a hawk, coyote tracks and several native plants during a nature scavenger hunt in nearby Baker Canyon, off Black Star Canyon Road.

The half-day outing — themed Nature in My Backyard and held on preserved wildlands on the Irvine Ranch — was a pilot program aimed at instilling in youth a love of nature and teaching them the importance of preserving and protecting natural open space.

“On a societal scale, kids growing up these days are increasingly disconnected from nature,” said Michael O’Connell, executive director of Irvine Ranch Conservancy, which hosted the event and was sponsored by the Irvine Company and the Donald Bren Foundation.

Bren, chairman of Irvine Company, recalled growing up in Southern California and appreciating nature on land similar to the preserved open spaces on the Irvine Ranch.

“They not only inspire, they create a sense of freedom,” Bren said in a statement.

“My hope is that this special outing instills a similar sense of freedom and wonder in (youth),” added Bren, who preserved 57,000 acres of Irvine Ranch land as open space.

Judging by the reactions of the 24 kids — second- to fifth-graders from the Irvine and Santa Ana clubs of the five-city Boys and Girls Club of Central Orange Coast — the event was a hit.

“I like being outdoors,” said Dulce Villasenor, 9. “I can spend time with my family instead of watching TV all day. Today, I learned that some flowers are lazy and they steal food from other plants.”

Dulce was referring to the pretty and innocent-looking pink plant called purple owl’s clover, which uses its roots to suck food from the California goldfields, as Native Seed Farm stewardship coordinator Rachel Lambert explained to the children.

Those two species of plants are among 52 the IRC grows on its 14-acre Native Seed farm for planting elsewhere.

Twin brothers Inyan and Inban Kathirazan, 9, members of the Irvine Boys and Girls Club, said they loved learning about nature.

“I learned that the quail is the state bird and the poppy is the state flower,” Inyan said.

As they hiked single-file down a trail in Baker Canyon, heading to lunch under a canopy, hike leader Michelle Clemente, director of community programs for the IRC, pointed to animal poop on the ground.

“You know what we call it out here?” Clemente asked the kids, some of them grossed out.

“Scat,” Clemente said. “It’s probably from a coyote or bobcat.”

O’Connell said the pilot Nature in My Backyard outing was a response to kids spending much less time outdoors now compared to prior decades — and the consequences such a societal shift can have not only on children, but on the outdoors.

“One future problem for conservation is we’re not bringing up the next generation of land stewards,” O’Connell said. “I sure as heck hope there is a fourth-grader who wants my job someday. And it’s my responsibility to get him or her ready for that, and to get them excited about it.”

Added O’Connell: “The Irvine Ranch Conservancy is never going to be a kids’ organization, and the Boys and Girls Club is never going to be a land organization. But if we can build bridges between the two, then the kids can walk over that bridge, and that’s exactly what this day is about.”

The children at the Saturday outing were treated to a Subway sandwich lunch and given Irvine Ranch Conservancy hats with animal designs on them, as well as T-shirts and water bottles.

Much more valuable, though, were the memories the kids took home with them.

One youngster gazed at a turkey vulture circling close overhead atop Loma Ridge.

“He’s not going to eat us,” Clemente reassured him. “He only eats dead things, and we’re very much alive.”

For information about volunteer and outdoor programs managed by the IRC, visit letsgooutside.org.

Greg Hardesty is a contributor to Times Community News.