After earning a college degree in English, Conrad Baker entered the news field and worked for four years generating daily, local online news content. He found himself increasingly drawn to stories based in wildlife and the outdoors, so in 2019, he changed course to pursue a career in outdoor education. He’s now an environmental educator at Letchworth State Park in New York’s Genesee Valley, where he’s developed a series of Nature Detective videos. Conrad also sits on the board of the New York State Outdoor Education Association.
I grew up on Grand Island, New York, on the Niagara River between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, just upstream of Niagara Falls. Our backyard went right up to a patch of woods and my brother and I would play in the woods all the time. I liked seeing recognizable birds, squirrels, deer – but I was captivated by butterflies. I had seen bird books and tree guides before, but I didn’t know that there were so many common kinds of butterflies. Every new butterfly I saw, I felt like I was discovering a new species. Dark mourning cloak butterflies and tiny iridescent azure butterflies seemed like rare species because I had never seen any images of them before.
When I was really young, my dad would take us on what we called adventure walks. We’d go through the woods, past a big fallen snag, and these huge oaks standing sky high. It was probably only a quarter mile, but it felt like a day’s-long journey. I remember being taken by the wonder of that wilderness. Now, looking back on it, it was a scrubby patch of regrown farm field, but it was a really magical place when I was little.
Going to college at SUNY Genesee got me into this area of the Genesee Valley for the first time. I spent time looking for little natural spots to get into and look around and have my own little adventure walks. That really helped me become more and more familiar with the natural assets and the landscape and some of the natural history here. It’s a beautiful place. I’ve been here 10 years.
When I was working for the news company, I found myself repeatedly consulting one of the outdoor educators at Letchworth State Park, Doug Bassett, about exciting wildlife sightings or beautiful natural phenomena in the park and the greater Genesee Valley. There was something about the park and wildlife that consistently captured the community’s interest. I started gravitating to these outdoor stories and decided to intentionally tell outdoor stories full time with a new career in outdoor education. I started volunteering at the Humphrey Nature Center in Letchworth, left the news company, and got an internship at Reinstein Woods Nature Preserve in Depew, near Buffalo. That was my first gig as an outdoor educator.
In February 2020 I started another internship, this one at Letchworth State Park. I became a seasonal employee in October 2020 and started in my current permanent position a year later. Now, I lead guided experiences at Letchworth State Park and occasionally other parks and sites in the Genesee Valley. These are school field trips, clubs, and public hikes that go through beautiful vistas, complex habitats, and historic sites. I get to call attention to specific observations at these places that tell the story of the land and its people.
Letchworth is kind of a hidden gem. It is close to major metropolitan areas. We pull from New York City, Boston, Toronto, even Chicago. We get lots of people from Pennsylvania and Ohio. It’s close enough to major population hubs that it is definitely weekend trip-able, and there’s a huge hospitality industry around the park. People can get into what feels like a really deep, hidden wilderness. But it’s really quite close to a lot of creature comforts of civilization.
When Covid struck, stay-at-home orders meant that Letchworth suddenly had no on-site guided experiences. My supervisors and I came up with a plan for me to do what I knew: jump in front of a camera. From my news blogging days, I remembered the importance of audio quality, in-the-field camera stabilization even without tools, and how to add basic lights and accessories with rubber bands, sticks, and crossed fingers. I had also just completed Certified Interpretive Guide training by the National Association of Interpretation (NAI), which gave me the industry standards for building effective guided experiences.
The Nature Detectives series is the child of that guide training, breaking news blogging experience, and DIY video production. Each video is intended to draw attention to common living things in kids’ neighborhoods – things that they might recognize but not know just how connected they are to our daily lives. Another lesson from my news training and experience is the importance of attributing claims to specific observations. If you’re going to claim that a bird is a ring-billed gull, you shouldn’t expect everyone to just take your word for it, you should have some specific observations to back it up and help a reasonable person come to the same conclusion. Each Nature Detective video includes three specific observations, or “nature clues,” that make the videos easy to organize, satisfyingly thorough with evidence, and a snackable length, usually 4 to 8 minutes.
I create Letchworth State Park’s content for Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, which has amounted to seasonal updates on trail conditions and park services, over 80 educational shorts, and seven in-depth mini-documentaries. Nature Detectives inspired the History Detectives series, which guides viewers to three clues that identify and explain the significance of a historic artifact or site in the park. We upload one Nature Detectives or History Detectives video every month. Longer, more in-depth mini documentaries, called “virtual field trip” videos, are uploaded every few months.
Environmental education institutions in general often feel that the culture is shifting too quickly to a technology-driven lifestyle disconnected from nature, and that this makes it an uphill battle to draw attention to the ways that species, habitats, and history affect us every day. I don’t know if that is completely true. At what other time in history could a 4th grader from Arizona watch orcas work together to strategically hunt seals in the melting Arctic? I think that because of technology, park patrons are more aware than ever that wild habitats and historic sites are beautiful and under threat from human behavior. The disconnect doesn’t seem to be between humans and nature, it seems to be between humans and their local nature.
The history of Letchworth State Park is fascinating and includes changing land management practices – from the Seneca indigenous people to the colonial Europeans to the new American colonies, and eventually down the line to William Pryor Letchworth, a successful iron and steel businessman in Buffalo. He was also a Quaker and an outspoken abolitionist. His decision to donate his 1,000-acre estate in the very southern end of what’s now Letchworth State Park – including the three largest waterfalls – set up this massive expansion of territory for what would eventually become a 14,350-acre state park. The park as we know it would never have been possible without that land donation. The effects of those decisions that were made in the past are still, link by link, attached to the natural treasure that we enjoy now.
The park also has the Autism Nature Trail, ANT for short. It’s a 1-mile long, ADA compliant trail built for people with sensory challenges or other difficulties related to autism disorders. There are eight interactive nature stations along the trail. There are some low-toned musical instruments, and spots where you can climb up high on a knoll and get a good look at your surroundings. There are some cuddle swings, which are like mini-hammocks, where you can get in and feel secure and enclosed. There’s a huge sensory station with lots of natural artifacts – branches and pine cones and bones and antlers and skulls – that everybody can explore and feel. It’s all about gradually acclimating somebody who’s maybe not very comfortable with lots of unpredictable stimuli. It slowly gets people deeper into nature, from a curated park look at the trailhead pavilion to a true kind of backcountry wilderness feel by the end.
Getting to introduce people to the dozens of waterfalls, gorge overlooks, and historic sites of Letchworth State Park never gets old. Even someone who has visited us a hundred times can always find something new to see. I get to show off the Genesee Valley as one of New York’s best vacation hotspots, draw patrons’ attention to diverse and complex living things in the park and their neighborhoods that they didn’t even know were affecting their lives every day, and tell stories from local history that are still unfolding today.
Trails 2 and 2A in Letchworth State Park weave through some truly ancient oaks, white pines, and hemlocks. Because the shale ravine terrain there is so steep, no logger of the early 19th century bothered to haul out every last tree. The ridges were thinned but never clear cut and tilled. They soon reforested. The gorgeous forest community growing there is astounding. Much of New York State’s vast forests are reforested farm fields, so these trails offer a rare opportunity to navigate forest paths surrounded by generations of moss, beautiful mushrooms, and sensitive, specialist birds.
I also dabble in “insect taxidermy,” which is insect collecting with a twist. I collect and pin insects for educational displays. But I steer away from the rigorous academic standards for wing positions and leg positions of a true entomologist. I think that having the trailing edge of a butterfly’s forewing perpendicular to its body looks unnatural and “too dead.” Instead, I pin butterflies and moths as if they were at rest. I once found a beautiful, intact monarch butterfly, stone cold dead and in incredibly good shape. I was able to rehydrate it using a relaxing chamber and get its body segments to move just enough to get it into a nice, open body posture, as if it was just sitting there resting. That butterfly is now in a formal educational insect collection at a local nature center.
Some of my favorite outdoor activities revolve around big forests. My dad, brother, and uncle make at least one annual canoe camping trip to the Adirondacks together, hopping from island to island on Little Tupper Lake, Lake Lila, Round Lake, and Rock Pond. We’re looking for bass and finding loons, eagles, beavers, strange dragonflies, and a truly staggering diversity of mushrooms. It’s never the same twice.
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