By Carolyn Szczepanski

carolyn@dmcityview.com

Danielle Wirth became such a persistent presence at Saylorville Lake that an exasperated administrator finally told her, "Wirth, you're getting to be such a pain in the ass, I figure if I hire you then I can tell you to go away." Little did he know that, 25 years later, Wirth would be shaking the hand of Interior Secretary Gale Norton and receiving a national award for her innovative work restoring an endangered habitat at that very same location. And adding to the irony? Wirth doesn't even work there anymore.

Although one of the first female park rangers in the country, when the Woodward resident moved to the Midwest from a state parks post in Pennsylvania in the late 1970s, Wirth was told she was overqualified for local positions and had to hound Saylorville staff several times a week before they hired her to run the visitors' center for nearly a decade. After several stints with the Department of Natural Resources, Wirth has settled into teaching at Iowa State and DMACC. But this outspoken professor's classroom is rarely contained within four walls, and, to aid the stretched-thin staff of the Army Corps of Engineers, she's enlisted a conservation contingent of her own: community college students.

"This land needs help," she remembers thinking several years ago. "I can't do it all myself, so what can I do in my life that will get people on this land? And I thought, well, I could invent a class."

And invent she did, creating a DMACC course comprised of a hands-on effort to restore native habitat. Restoration of Nature Plant Communities started as "an experiment," she says. But, just three years since its inception, it's proven popular with students - from a graphic designer taking the class for essentially no credit to a West Des Moines city parks official enrolled by his boss - and beat out scores of other secondary education initiatives around the country to garner a national "Take Pride in America" award last month.

As Wirth points out, the pride of the tallgrass prairie bioregion is shared by three distinct ecosystems: open prairie, wetlands and oak savannas. And while wetlands and prairies are desperately imperiled, she says, it's the savannas that are most endangered. Thanks to fire suppression, grazing and homebuilders who relish development in such "oak parks," the state's savannas have been nearly "obliterated."

"So this is rare indeed," she says surveying an evolving 21-acre site at Saylorville. "And the more we're up and down this river valley, we think we have more savanna than we've documented. We just don't recognize it because they're so overgrown and ill-used. But once you start applying these restoration techniques - an indicator species survey, remove the invasives, release the seed bank and put back the processes of fire and hydrology - then you're really cooking."

And the heat's been on this southwest corner of the park since students conducted a plant survey earlier this year, identifying the telltale signs of savanna - plants like muhly grass and wild rye growing beneath a canopy of oak trees. Last week, even as rain fell and a brisk wind whipped up the hill, they continued clearing out invasive trees (like elms and maples) that were shading to death the habitat-defining oaks that need the sun to survive. And next month, the already-eager students will set the whole hill on fire, scorching out the remaining woody invaders.

But while it will still be several years before it becomes a model habitat that could become a common stop for school field trips, a healthy savanna is already beginning to surface. The tiny saplings of the next generation of regal oaks are poking through the now- sunshine-dappled soil and, on a recent visit, Wirth was delighted to see a crowd of rare red-headed woodpeckers that "were just having a blast," she says. "So here was a threatened species that has been helped."

But the birds aren't the only ones having a blast; soaked in sweat and rain, the students linger to admire rocks, identify plants and sing a few bars of "Let Me Entertain You" as they change out of their coveralls. And while Wirth will certainly take pride in the restored savanna and the national recognition, the real prize isn't restricted to the natural world.

"My May class, we bonded in very interesting ways," she says. "They call each other. They call me. They still get together on weekends and do restoration for fun. It's really a deep experience and it changes some." CV

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