MARQUETTE – A nature preserve that’s home to Midway Creek, marsh marigolds and ruffed grouse served as an outdoor classroom for North Star Academy students Tuesday.

The students visited the Vielmetti-Peters Preserve, located at the terminus of Brickyard Road in Marquette Township, for a day of study that involved observation and nature sketching.

The day also served a practical purpose as students put in temporary signs identifying trees such as black ash.

For seventh-grader Abby Carey, it was a chance to get out of an indoors classroom and be surrounded by quaking aspens, balsam firs, sensitive ferns, thimbleberries and wild columbine.

Carey and her fellow students walked around the preserve, learning about nature in the process.

“We had to find different types of trees, and we had little signs, and so we put those in the ground where we thought the tree was,” Carey said.

While trying to ID tree species, Carey learned certain arboreal facts, such as a balsam fir has straight and smooth needles and a black cherry has red leaves.

She also picked up two ticks, unfortunate hazards of spending time outdoors. However, one of the students had the dubious honor of being the official tick remover, using a lint roller to remove the tiny arachnids.

Tick-fest aside, Natalie Wierzbicki and Michele Talsma, seventh- and eighth-grade teachers, respectively, were on hand to guide the students in their outdoor lessons.

Talsma said North Star Academy runs a community environmental education program.

Spots such as the Vielmetti-Peters Preserve would seem likely places for students to take part in those program activities.

“We live in the Great Lakes region, and one of the best things for the kids to do is get outside of the classroom,” Talsma said. “I said that the U.P. has a wonderful outdoor classroom for students to learn about where they live, what it in their environment, why it’s their job to protect the environment.”

It’s also a service learning opportunity for the students to work with the U.P. Land Conservancy, she said.

The UPLC eventually will be the preserve’s steward.

Wierzbicki said the seventh-grade class has a tree identification unit with its plant studies at the start of the school year, so the Tuesday project brings it back “full circle” to what they started earlier.

“At the beginning of the year, they do a reflection project,” Wierzbicki said. “They identify different trees, so this is kind of a review and a real-life application to what we did previously in the year.”

Eighth-graders also grow native species for a water garden at North Star, plus students also work with the Hiawatha National Forest and plant right at the school, Talsma said.

UPLC Assistant Director Jeffrey Caldwell helped on the field trip.

“I did a couple lessons in the classroom, showing them how to nature journal and then how to use GPS,” Caldwell said, “and we kind of put those two skills together today, walking around the woods finding native species with the GPS, and then we drew them in the nature journal. Some of them are amazing drawings.”

Permanent signs will replace the students’ temporary signs in, it is hoped, about two months, he said.

The UPLC will be in charge of the 130-acre preserve, with paperwork still being completed, said Caldwell, who pointed out although the preserve isn’t officially in UPLC’s hands yet, people still can come out and hike.

For the time being, Kathy Peters is the official owner of the property. She too took part in Tuesday’s activities.

Peters, who said the land is in the Michigan Department of Natural Resources’ Commercial Forest program, said people are welcome on the site as long as they don’t make fires.

However, she expressed confidence in the UPLC taking over the property.

“Because I knew they would take care of it,” Peters said. “And I didn’t want to sell it and turn it into housing, and It’s too beautiful, this land.”

Christie Bleck can be reached at 906-228-2500, ext. 250.