More than 700 Greene County fifth-grade students are learning more about the natural environment this week while visiting Davy Crockett Birthplace State Park.

“Conservation Camp” events there last most of a day, so it now takes three days to accommodate all the students from city and county schools and those from Greeneville Adventist Academy and Towering Oaks Christian School, said Candy Adams, executive director of Keep Greene Beautiful, which coordinates the camp.

Tuesday was the Conservation Camp’s first day, with the program running through Thursday.

“Explore and Conserve Our Environment” is the theme, with 11 learning stations focusing on either exploring or conserving the natural world.

The event is sponsored this year by Keep Greene Beautiful, the Tennessee Valley Authority, Waste Management, the Middle Nolichucky Watershed Alliance, and the Greene County Soil Conservation District.

They are being assisted by Camp Explore, the state’s Department of Transportation and Department of Agriculture, Eastman Chemical Company, and the Cedar Creek Learning Center.

Need To Protect Animals

“I’m on a mission,” Jerry Rhinehardt, director of Camp Explore at the Clyde Austin 4-H Camp, told students who stopped at the “pelts and skins” teaching station.

Rhinehardt showed wild animal skins and skulls, to show how the animal’s fur and teeth helped them survive and thrive. For comparison, he also had a realistic-looking plastic human skull.

“We’re responsible on this planet to take care of the things that are here,” including the animals, he said. “We are the only animal on Earth that can make decisions, that has knowledge” to help with those decisions, Rhinehardt told the fifth-graders.
In today’s world, “Animals have to adapt to us,” he said, and we need to make sure that they can.

“I don’t want to go to a zoo to see a wild animal,” he said. “Zoos make me sad,” Rhinehardt said, because the animals in them are no longer wild.
“I want to make sure these animals are in the wild, like they are supposed to,” he said.

He showed a beaver pelt, and let the students see how thick it is, and how oil-rich, then he showed a beaver skull, with its massive front teeth ideal for cutting trees. Students didn’t have to touch anything if they didn’t want to, but most marveled at being able to actually touch beaver teeth.

He asked if students had ever seen a beaver on television or in the wild that was carrying a stick while swimming. He said he had always wondered why beavers didn’t drown when they did that, until he learned that their lips are behind the big teeth, but in front of the rest of their teeth, so the beaver can carry a stick in its front teeth with its mouth closed.

Learning About Fossils

At the fossils learning station, presenter J.R. Arnold displayed his own extensive collection of fossils, which he uses as an instructor at Camp Explore.

Students got to actually touch and closely examine fossils estimated to be hundreds of millions of years old as Arnold explained how they were formed by sedimentation, mineral replacement, or other processes.

He showed the jawbone of a contemporary mako shark, still ringed with relatively small teeth, then he showed the students a shark tooth several inches long, found in a mineral mine in Florida.

“How big do you think this shark was?” Arnold asked, as the students tried to imagine.

Then he said, “I’ve seen a shark tooth as big as my hand,” and went on to explain that some prehistoric sharks were “as big as your school bus,” as dozens of young eyes grew wider.

Arnold said that when he saw and touched his first fossil as a boy, he thought it was “about the coolest thing I had ever seen.”

Judging from their faces, some of the fifth-graders had the same reaction.
Collecting Fish

The Conservation Camp begins each day at 9:15 a.m., but by about 7 a.m. Tuesday a Tennessee Valley Authority team was in Limestone Creek where it feeds into the Nolichucky River, “shocking” fish to stun them for capture, and gathering aquatic insects.

Chris Cooper, a TVA biologist, with help from Clint Jones, a watershed specialist, and John Thurman, a TVA retiree put back to work under contract because of his expertise with water bugs, collected shiners, darters and in all several dozen fish from the waters.

Cooper filled several tanks with green-side darters, blue-side darters, and gilt darters, and one brightly colored tangerine darter specimen that wowed the students in Miss Kim Ball’s fifth-grade class at Mosheim Elementary School.

He told how “old-timers” in these parts like to eat the golden red horse, a sucker which has soft, edible bones, like salmon, and showed the students several.

Thurman worked with a tank full of aquatic insects. When he asked the fifth-graders what they thought a whirligig beetle smelled like, some of the kids were too repulsed to trust their senses, until finally one little boy let Cooper put the bug next to his nose and said, “That smells good.”

Then another noticed it smelled like apples, which it does, perhaps sour apples.
“Like apple Jolly Ranchers,” said Cooper, mentioning the popular hard candy, and triggering nods of agreement.

Thurman also told the youngsters that the whirligig’s Latin name is gyrinidae.

A Few Kiss Fish

When displaying the northern hog sucker, a slender fish with prodigious lips, Cooper said that a kiss from this fish is a sure-fire way to have good luck the rest of the day, and in each class, he found several fifth-graders, usually boys, willing to test his assertion.

Thurman told the students that an aggressive bottom-dwelling insect called the “grampus” locally is actually the larval stage of the helgramite, which later (if not eaten by a smallmouth bass) becomes a very large and startling looking flying insect known as the Dobson fly.

Monitoring Streams’ Health

Thurman asked the students if they thought he looked healthy, and they mostly thought he did. But he pointed out that it’s hard to tell if a person is healthy without lab tests, blood work, and perhaps C-rays or CAT scans.

A stream is like that, he said.

“You can’t tell if a stream is healthy by looking, you’ve got to get in there with nets,” and catch fish and other aquatic life, he said.

The presence or absence of various species is one way that the health of a stream is judged, he said. The Nolichucky River, though muddy and fairly unimpressive in some spots, “is pretty healthy,” Thurman said.

He told the students that what he and the other TVA scientists were doing — and what they might be asked on a test later — was “biological monitoring.”
Cooper noted that Tuesday’s netting turned up a species of sunfish that is not native to these waters, and has in fact “invaded” these waters from somewhere else.

Its presence counts against the river’s overall health “score,” Cooper said, but that was more than offset by all the native species that were found.