Ask a room of nine-year-olds what they think the world will look like when they are grown, and you will often get answers that sound older and heavier than they are. Many children have absorbed the idea that the ending has already been written, and that whatever they do will not change it much. I do not think we help them by arguing with that feeling. I think we help them by handing them a true story that runs the other way.
Here is mine, and it begins on a boat.
A nest on a channel marker
Some of my happiest childhood memories come from sailing on the Chesapeake Bay with my parents and my sister. One of the channel markers we passed on the way out of the harbor was almost always topped with a great big osprey nest. I can still picture my father craning his neck and calling us over when he spotted the birds. The best moments were when one took off or came back in, wings spread across the whole sky.
But this was the early 1970s, and ospreys were in trouble. The pesticide DDT had moved up the food chain into the fish they ate, thinning their eggshells until the eggs broke under the weight of the parent sitting on them. Their numbers fell sharply. Some years we sailed past that marker and there was no nest at all.
Then people did something about it. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring changed how ordinary readers understood pollution and what it was doing to animals. A movement grew out of that. Congress passed laws. DDT was banned in the United States in 1972. Organizations like Save the Bay and a great many local naturalists went to work cleaning up the Chesapeake.
And it worked
That is the sentence I want students to sit with, because it is not a hope or a slogan. It is a measurement.
In 1975 there were about 1,500 active osprey nests on the Chesapeake Bay. By 2010 there were 9,000. The same pattern repeated in one place after another, from the Pacific Northwest to Europe to Asia. Ospreys are now a common sight on channel markers, light poles, and nesting platforms up and down the coast. Children can walk outside and see the result of a decision adults made before their parents were born.
That is the rare thing about this story, and the reason I think it belongs in classrooms. Most of what we teach children about the environment asks them to imagine a consequence far in the future. This one runs the other way. The cause is in the past, the effect is overhead, and the chain connecting them is short enough for a fourth grader to hold in one thought: people noticed a problem, people changed what they were doing, and the birds came back.
Two more comebacks
Ospreys were not the only ones. The same DDT ban, paired with legal protection, brought back the bald eagle. In 1963 there were 417 known nesting pairs left in the lower 48 states. The most recent federal survey counted more than 71,400 nesting pairs and roughly 316,700 individual birds. The species was taken off the endangered list in 2007.
There is also a story that has nothing to do with birds, which makes it useful as a second example. In the 1980s scientists discovered a growing hole in the ozone layer, the part of the atmosphere that shields us from the sun's ultraviolet radiation. Nations negotiated the Montreal Protocol, and more than 99 percent of the chemicals responsible have since been phased out of refrigerators, air conditioners, and aerosol cans. The ozone layer is healing. Scientists now expect it to return to 1980 levels around 2040 over most of the world, and by about 2066 over Antarctica.
Three different problems. Three different solutions. The same shape underneath: humans identified a cause, changed course, and the natural world responded.
What this does not mean
I am not suggesting we tell children everything is fine. It is not, and they would not believe us anyway.
Ospreys face a new threat now. Their fall migration runs straight through hurricane season, and as storms grow stronger, more young birds are lost at sea on their first journey south. That is a real danger and worth saying out loud.
But there is a difference between a problem that is hard and a problem that is hopeless, and children cannot always tell them apart on their own. They need evidence for the difference. The osprey story is that evidence. Having seen what determined people accomplished for these birds once is exactly how I approach what is happening to them now.
Why ospreys earn their place in the curriculum
- 1
Geography
An osprey's migration runs thousands of miles from New England to South America. Students trace coastlines, cross the Gulf, name countries, and calculate distances. The map stops being decoration and becomes a route. - 2
Weather
Migrating birds depend on wind, fronts, and storm systems. Students can follow live conditions and ask why a bird would wait three days before crossing open water. - 3
Life science
Food chains, habitat, adaptation, predator and prey. DDT moving from insects to fish to birds is one of the clearest bioaccumulation examples available at this grade level, and students grasp it quickly. - 4
Math
Distance, rate, time, population change over decades. The nest counts above are a data set. - 5
Literacy and SEL
Young ospreys migrate alone. Their parents leave first, and the fledglings have to find South America by themselves. Children recognize that situation immediately, which is why it carries so much discussion about courage, independence, and doing something frightening for the first time.
Where to start
The teacher resources section of my site has free materials built for grades 3 through 5 and aligned to NGSS and CASEL standards: a complete curriculum guide, a cross-curricular planning map, chapter-by-chapter study questions, an osprey migration geography activity with an answer key, instructions for building an osprey nest and a wingspan model, and SEL discussion cards.
Start wherever fits your year. But do tell students the part about the birds coming back. What can I say: I write children's books, so I prefer happy endings.
Letitia B. Burton is the author of Soar: The Incredible Journey of Hendrix and Ryder, the story of twin osprey brothers making their first migration alone. Free classroom materials are available in the teacher resources section.