From Massachusetts to Florida, the Olympic Peninsula to the Smoky Mountains to New Hampshire, Dawn Dextraze has lived in many places. Wherever she goes, she maintains a strong connection to the outdoors. As an environmental educator, Dawn has spent a couple of decades introducing people – from young students to retirees – to the natural world. For the past seven years she’s been the education and outreach specialist for the Sullivan County Conservation District and Natural Resources Department in New Hampshire.
Until I was school-aged, my parents were fruit pickers, so they moved around to where the farms were. I was born in Bellows Falls, Vermont. My brother a year and a half later was born in Pennsylvania when they were picking apples. My other brother was born in Florida when they were picking citrus. We sort of grew up all over the place, but my dad’s family lives in western Massachusetts, and we were there for some of my younger years.
My brothers and I played outside all the time. We had a big field and forests behind us, and we just roamed around. My grandma watched us, and she would kick us out and call us in for lunch time, then kick us out and call us in when my parents came. We hiked in the Berkshires and went to waterfalls and swam in the summer and ice skated on the ponds in winter. We moved to central Florida when I was in 3rd grade, so mostly I grew up in Florida in the scrub oak, swampy places with citrus groves, before there were a ton of people there. But New England still feels like home.
When it came time to consider what I was going to study in college, I decided on zoology, because I love animals. But I ended up being more of an ecologist, because I love the relationships between plants and animals and how systems work. I’ve always been a person who connects things and likes that relational piece. I wasn’t sure what to do after school, because there were so many options. The one thing I was sure of was that I did not want to teach.
The first thing I did after college was work with the Student Conservation Association. I did a year-long residential internship in western Massachusetts, and one of the things that we did was team teach environmental education with a partner in the schools. I also worked at Mount Greylock State Reservation at the visitor’s center, creating exhibits around the different ecosystems you find as you’re hiking up the mountain. The second part of the job was trail work, and I went all around Massachusetts doing trail work at the different state parks.
I took the job so I could do the trail work, and I ended up loving the education piece. The education coordinator told me about a YMCA camp on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State where I could go and live as a residential educator, a job I had no idea even existed. I went out there, and I never really looked back. For six or seven years I worked in residential environmental education, moving from East Coast to West Coast – I kept hopping back and forth, because I loved them both so much. Then I decided to go to graduate school at UNH, where I earned a master’s in environmental education.
That allowed me to get a permanent environmental educator job in the Smoky Mountains. I worked for seven years as a naturalist at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park for the Tremont Institute. I got a lot of experience in training and teaching teachers, so I was able to do some professional development for teachers, and I was able to teach some of the education staff at the National Park Service, too. That was a really great place to learn and grow.
The Smokies are really neat and really diverse. I love them – they’re my heart’s home. If my nephews, who are also my heart, weren’t in New Hampshire, I would still be in the Smokies. My brother, who has three kids, lived in Tennessee for a while, so I was close enough to spend time with them. Then they moved up to New Hampshire, and I moved about three years after that so I could be near my nephews. I do love New Hampshire, too. I usually love wherever I am.
When I came to New Hampshire, there was an opening for an education and outreach specialist here at Sullivan County Natural Resources Department and the Conservation District. It had some trail work, education, all these things that I enjoyed and have experience in. It felt like a perfect fit. Being an education and outreach specialist is really about providing education and resources related to the natural world, conservation of the natural world, and our role in it. We support local agriculture, so the food system network is also a piece of what we do here.
It’s a lot of finding ways to get information out to the community, finding out what they are interested in, and providing that. We do community programs. We have a spring plant sale. We have a trail network to keep up. We do guided hikes sometimes. We have a community garden, and we bring in speakers for that. We also speak at garden clubs about pollinators and about native plants. And we work with farms to do demonstrations on best practices for climate resiliency – to help farmers mitigate climate change as well as adapt to the different weather things that are happening.
There are multiple ways I work with schools. I go to schools and bring the kids out into their school yard or to a greenspace near their school yard to learn. I also work with teachers to tailor the lessons to them. We have a menu of seasonal things – environmental education is all about whatever is happening now and here. It makes it really relevant for students. Sometimes groups come out to the forest lands, where we have an outdoor classroom and a pond and a creek and a garden area. We have a couple of schools that do lessons here once a month – a homeschool group of younger kids, and a class of high school life skills students, so it really runs the gamut.
I also work with teachers on professional development, teaching them how to use their school yard and green spaces for getting outside, and what kind of routines we can use outdoors, because it’s different than an indoor classroom. You can have more noise out there, and it’s OK for the kids to turn and talk to each other and be loud, and exclamations are usually a good learning thing. It’s a lot of hands-on, inquiry based, student-driven learning when you’re exploring, observing, investigating, and discovering. It’s just really getting them comfortable in that environment.
Taking kids outside allows those students who like to roam and explore and be hands-on to show their teachers and classmates a different side of them. Maybe they can’t handle sitting still inside and doing one thing for a long time. They learn in a different way. A kid who isn’t super studious in the classroom may be holding on to every word and doing everything we ask them to do outdoors. One winter, I brought a group of 6th graders from Charlestown Middle School out, and three of them crawled into a hollow tree to do a writing project. They asked for a thermometer, because they noticed it felt warmer inside the tree. They started doing their own little experiments and writing about how much warmer it was in the log. Those kids might not sit down at a desk and write from a prompt, but outside they were excited to be writing about what they were experiencing.
I also love butterflies. I have my own pollinator garden and raise host plants for all sorts of butterflies. In the Smokies, I did some butterfly monitoring. I’d go out once a week and take my binoculars, walk slowly through the fields and mark the species I found. I had to learn how to identify these different butterflies. I’d have my field guides with me, and a good camera lens to take photos of the ones that would fly off really quickly so I could look at them later and figure out what they were. That helped me learn more about different species of butterflies. Butterflies have unique lifecycles, and the caterpillars can be really cool.
We also did monarch tagging in the Smokies, and I started learning a lot about monarchs. I love the way monarchs fly and glide. I love their color. Most butterflies, including monarchs, we still don’t know much about, even after they’ve been studied a ton. There are still so many mysteries and discoveries to make. I do some monitoring now with monarch eggs and larvae, looking for those on milkweed and monitoring during the breeding season, not just during migration.
I had the chance, in 2016, to go to Mexico and see the overwintering site. It was amazing. There is a man down there who is like the Barbara Walters of Mexico – he’s the interview person on the news. He brought a tag up to the Smokies that was found in the overwintering site but originated at our tagging site 14 years before. My best friend was a citizen science coordinator – and she spoke fluent Spanish – so she was able to talk with him, and he invited her down to Mexico to visit the sanctuary. This man was one of first people to make a documentary on monarchs in the 1970s, when they found these winter roosting sites. He’s still making documentaries. We got to go to some of the sanctuaries that aren’t open to the public. We went with the film crew, riding in the back of pickup trucks up these bumpy roads. It was really neat to be able to see that piece of it.
This year, New Hampshire is really beefing up its butterfly monitoring network. They used to only have one butterfly count. This year, they have six in the spring and six summer ones. I’ve been going to all the Zoom ID sessions for it, and they’ve had over 300 people in the sessions. There are a lot of people who want to know about butterflies in New Hampshire right now.
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