Wildlife center teems with fun

SANDPOINT — Ever see an otter doing what it ought to, standing on its hind legs in a pond? How about a beaver, making kids believers, telling them to crawl into his lodge?

If you’ve had the urge to join a black bear as it lumbers across a mountain slope in search of breakfast, your table is ready. Afterward, you can stand toe-to-toe with a bugling elk or stop to exchange pleasantries with a cougar as she relaxes on a boulder. These displays — and nearly 150 more scenes from the great outdoors that surround them — stand frozen in time at the Lehman Wildlife Education Center.

The interactive learning center exists thanks to the hard work and financial support of more than 60 volunteers and an equal number of business and individual donors, all of whose names are listed on framed plaques inside. In a stand-alone structure just south of the main exhibit building at the Bonner County Fairgrounds, this volunteer labor of love has been a work in progress since its groundbreaking ceremony in July 1999.

Within days of that first shovel turning, the concrete slab was poured. Inside of two weeks, the walls were raised. In less than a month the trusses were lifted into place and by the time six weeks had gone by, the siding was on and the doors flung open for the first group of visitors during the annual county fair.

“It was a whale of a community effort — the place was crawling with tradesmen and volunteer workers,” said Oz Osborn, who has been involved with the education center project since the beginning. He went on to name a host of volunteer contractors, subcontractors, teachers, students and local businesses whose “spirit and commitment” brought the center to life — far too many, in fact, to even begin to list here.

Two names in particular stand out in a project that sparkles with generosity, according to Osborn.

“Ed Lehman and his wife, Pat, were heavily involved in all of this,” he said. “Ed built the wildlife education center at the fairgrounds in Coeur d’Alene and this is a dead-ringer for that building.

“When we got a bid of $8,000 to paint the nature murals on all the walls, Pat stepped in and volunteered to do the whole thing and all it cost us was the price of the paint,” he added. “And both of them worked for weeks to build the papier mache scenery in the displays.”

When Ed pulled back due to health concerns a few years ago, the Bonner County Sportsmen’s Association became the sole supporter of the wildlife center.

The interior of the center is ringed with a colorful series of natural environments — “pockets,” as Osborn calls them. Snow-tipped ridgelines adjoin an alpine meadow that leads down to a stream that actually flows into a pond filled with live fish. Across the way, wetlands sit nestled up to a burn area in the high country. Throughout them all, wildlife trophies owned by local sportsmen have been loaned to the center to depict the creatures found in this part of the world.

Osborn wanders around this diorama like a kid circling a Christmas morning train set. And when he completes his tour, he sets off again, working and handling the interactive display kiosks in the center of the room.

“Please Touch” invites the sign next to the animal furs. “Do You Know Your Trout?” queries another, where life-sized, fished-shaped doors cover the answer behind them. “Guess that Track” lets guests connect a pair of pointers to columns of prints and animals, rewarding them with a burst of light when they make the correct match. A glass case at the back of the center puts a laugh into learning with personal contributions from bison, bear, coyotes and more in a display labeled, “Who Pooped in the Woods?” — a title borrowed from a children’s book by the same name.

All of the animals represented here can’t compete with the real wildlife that shows up each year during the Bonner County Fair.

“We get literally thousands of people through this building,” Osborn said. “The kids are the most fun to watch — and to listen to. My favorite thing is the little youngsters coming through. That’s a winner.”

The sportsmen’s association recently installed a cooling system in the pond, so that the fish would keep swimming on hot days at fair time. Before that, keeping them peppy involved frequent ice runs.

“One summer, we had to put over 500 pounds of crushed ice in the pond to cool the water down so the fish would be active for the kids.

“For the kids” is a phrase Osborn uses regularly when talking about the learning center. In the off season, the association uses the building for bow hunter education classes and a few local teachers have brought their classroom students over to meet with wildlife experts who volunteer to show them around and answer questions.

“We’ve held classes for the schools, but not as many as we’d like to,” said Osborn, who suspects that tight budgets for things like bus transportation might be the reason the center is not used more often. “Hopefully, that will improve, because something like this is such a natural for science classes.”

Long before the current center was completed, another local sportsman was known for his popular display in an annex to the main exhibit building. Leo Hadley’s trout pond was a must-see for local kids visiting the fair. Live fish darted about among its boulders and a large stump sat in the middle, a natural target where coins could be tossed to raise money for the association.

For a number of years, live animals were displayed in cages — a practice Osborn said had to be discontinued as it became viewed as being politically incorrect.

Local sportsmen have paid homage to Hadley by naming the Leo Hadley Range on Lake Street in his honor. The learning center, meanwhile, has carried a piece of his original work to the new location.

“Leo was the glue that held this together in the early years,” Osborn said. “We moved all of those big boulders and his old cedar log over here for the pond so we’d have a piece of that display in this building.”

Although “every cranny of the building” is full at this point, Osborn still has one dream display left unrealized. It is a problematic one, since the animal is protected under both federal and tribal laws, but he wonders out loud if someone might have an existing mount from before that time.

“I’d just love to have a bald eagle in here,” he said. “Can’t you just imagine him soaring down from the ceiling when you walk in? That would be magnificent.”

With or without the eagle, the center offers this retired shop teacher plenty to be proud of. He used his own shop to build informational kiosks and the rails in front of the displays. As much as he enjoys the woodworking, it’s those times when school groups arrive or parents kneel down to grab a mold and make tracks in the wet sand with their children that Oz Osborn becomes one happy guy.

“Kids love this place,” he said. “They line up to crawl into the beaver lodge and hide out and then they run over to the pond and stand together like crows on a rail to lean over and look at the fish.

“It’s just a joy — a total joy.”

To arrange educational tours or to volunteer at the Lehman Wildlife Education Center, contact Osborn at 263-7560.