No Wild Bore for Pupils : Nature: Santa Ana fifth-graders have fun hiking, tracking animals and smelling sage and flowers in Rancho Mission Viejo Land Conservancy’s Junior Wildlife Biologist Program.

Instead of enjoying cake and ice cream, Arthur Ochoa spent his 11th birthday Thursday hiking through the mountains, tracking animals and smelling sage and wildflowers.

He and 59 other fifth-graders from Glenn L. Martin Elementary School in Santa Ana visited the 1,200-acre Rancho Mission Viejo Land Conservancy as part of the Junior Wildlife Biologist Program, which gives students hands-on exposure to wildlife biology.

“There’s a lot of interesting things that I haven’t seen before,” Ochoa said.

The trip was a worthy birthday present for Ochoa, and a unique experience for his schoolmates, because “most of these children live in the city and don’t get an opportunity to walk in a field,” said teacher Dawn Hibbs.

For the past three weeks, Hibbs had been giving lessons to her students, most of whom speak English as a second language, in anticipation of the visit.

The students rolled up in a yellow school bus early Thursday morning, waving and laughing, knapsacks filled with picnic lunches and name tags affixed to their sweat shirts.

The day started with a hike up a winding trail, where conservancy Executive Director Jill Davison and several volunteers showed students how to figure out what animals eat by looking at their droppings, how to identify and avoid poison oak, and how to recognize Indian paintbrush and other wildflowers.

They also examined the footprints of nocturnal bobcats and deer, and discussed the uses of wild sage that grows there. One type can be used for cooking, said volunteer Kit Cooper, and another was used by Native Americans to camouflage their human scent when hunting.

In designing the program, Davison, a UC Berkeley graduate in natural resource management who has since worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said, “I took all the funnest things I did in school and work and put them in this program.”

Many of the kids were having fun, especially when dissecting owl pellets. The hardened, egg-sized stones filled with feathers and bones are what owls spit out in a ball after eating a pocket gopher, mouse or other small creature, Davison explained.

As some students picked apart the stones, they squealed in both delight and disgust.

“Ooh, that’s going to be nice,” said Ricky Rios, 10, who said this was his first time hiking and exploring wildlife. Once he got his tweezers going, he observed, “It’s kind of like a prize; it takes a long time to open.”

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But 10-year-old classmate Jessica Meza was not as thrilled. The first-time hiker shrieked when she extracted an intact skull of a tiny mouse or bird and some other items of anatomy that reminded her of a tiny claw.

“We found nails!” she yelled, distressed.

Students then separated the bones from the feathers and glued them to a card to take back to school.

Next on the agenda was a 30-minute bird walk, followed by a chance to learn about the habitat of the animals by setting harmless traps for them. Students explore the animal species’ health and population, then let them go free.

The conservancy has had an event almost every week since opening to the public a year ago. A school group visits about once every three weeks, and Scout troops and the public take two-hour nature walks there every other Saturday.

Davison, a self-described “one-woman show,” raises funds, does land management and habitat restoration.

She called the day a success, adding that getting students interested in wildlife biology as a possible career is one goal.

It’s “really neat being able to turn them on to it, so that maybe when their friends say, ‘Let’s go to the mall,’ they’ll say, ‘No, let’s go for a hike.’ ”