This article appeared in the Spring 2009 Piedmont View.

About 250 children, including students from local Fauquier County schools, visit the Environmental Studies center every year. Photo by Carol Buck.

People approach the hilltop very quietly at sunset, whispering. And they wait, while the sky grows darker. When they hear the first buzzing call, some people think of insects. But it's not an insect. It's a woodcock beginning his courtship ritual. "We're listening for the first peent! and everyone gets so excited," Caryl Buck says. "Then you hear more and more. There's a certain whirring as the birds go up. There's a certain whirring of their wing as they come down." The woodcocks launch upward from the grass, spiraling and looping in the sky. At the conclusion of their dance, they dive dramatically back to the ground. "Woodcocks always land in the same place they started, so you run up to where you last heard the peent! and if you're lucky you get to see them," Ms. Buck says.

"This is something that's been going on everybody's whole life here in the northern Piedmont," she says, "and very few people have ever gotten to see it. That's our education."

Ms. Buck is a consultant and a former assistant director at the Environmental Studies center of the International Academy for Preventive Medicine near Warrenton-a 1,000 acre property that includes pastures, forests, meadows, wetlands, vernal pools, streams, ponds and a lake. At the center, people interact closely with nature, from the scientists who do groundbreaking research on honeybees, amphibians, migratory songbirds and swans, among other flora and fauna, to children who roam paths in a high-grass meadow, catching insects in long nets.

"They get so excited," Ms. Buck says. "They'll say, look at this BUG I got! And we'll compare it to the charts and ask them, is that a BUG? And they'll check it out and say, no it's a BEETLE. I've got the biggest BEETLE!"

Among the many visitors who come to the Environmental Studies center every year, about 250 are children, many from the local schools in Fauquier County.

"What we're trying to do," Ms. Buck says, "is instill that awareness of nature that is no longer a part of children."

The center's motto is "Live as a part of nature, not apart from nature."

When people see themselves as a part of nature, they may approach many decisions differently. For instance, Ms. Buck says, as people learn about birds that won't even fly over a roadway cutting through a forest and that won't reproduce unless they have sufficient range, people may become more appreciative of the miles of unbroken woodlands of which the center's forests are a part.

"While we are not an advocacy organization," Ms. Buck says, "we hope that people would come to realize that these unfragmented habitats are very important and that we should try to preserve them."

A brochure for the center states: "Environmental Studies emphasizes conservation: integrating nature with human activity and development needs, so that natural resources are sustainably renewed instead of depleted."

In 2008, the center acted on that ideal by donating a conservation easement on 890 acres of land. The easement includes diverse wildlife habitats as well as farmland, where the center is interested in exploring locally oriented, sustainable agriculture. The easement provides for 50 foot buffers along Towsers Run, before it flows into Warrenton Reservoir, the drinking source for the Town of Warrenton. It also protects views from Blantyre Road, a Virginia Scenic Byway.

Tom Wood, Executive Director of the center, says, "The conservation easement ensures that we can keep the land in a natural state in perpetuity and manage it for wildlife habitat."

Read more articles from the Spring 2009 Piedmont View