There is a considerable amount of natural history contained within the Oak Ridges Moraine; enough that someone should teach a course on it.

Well, someone is. Ivana Stehlik, a professor in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Toronto has started the course at Koffler Scientific Reserve at Jokers Hill in the area of Dufferin Street
and Highway 9.

The course is entitled The Natural History of the Oak Ridges Moraine, and Stehlik explains its goal is “to get an appreciation and knowledge of organisms that live on the Oak Ridges Moraine,” as well as “how these plants
and animals interact with each other and their surroundings.”

She tries to relate this information in such a way that participants in the course can pass the knowledge on to others, such as outdoor educators, etc. Stehlik herself developed the course, which is currently in the middle of its first session.
She also wrote a manual, which she hopes to have published and released in the next two or three years, as a “kind of field guide to the Oak Ridges Moraine.”

The course is a way to “spread the appreciation and knowledge of the Oak Ridges Moraine as one of our most precious ecological systems,” she says.

While she is a professor, Stehlik says she is aiming the program at the general public, with no previous knowledge of biology. One of the participants has a degree in biology, but “18 of them had done no real studies in biology or ecology.”

The course covers such material as land use through time by humans, including natives and Europeans; geology; biodiversity; animal and plant winter survival, etc.

In addition to herself, Stehlik said she has outside specialists in certain fields to help her teach, from such places as the Royal Ontario Museum or other departments at U of T.

The course is being taught at Koffler Scientific Reserve, with roughly half the time being spent in the classroom and the other half outdoors, affording participants the chance to use and explore what they hear about inside.

The current session of the course has 19 participants, and Stehlik says four of them have full-time jobs. The course consists of 22 classes, conducted Thursday afternoons from 1 to 5 p.m. It began Jan. 15, and will be going until
June, so taking it represents quite a time commitment. But it also ensures “there is enough time to delve into a little more detail within each organismal group taught.”

The original plan was to cap the class at 16, but the interest was more than Stehlik anticipated, with some 30 names on the waiting list. “I was very surprised,” she says.

She adds she planning to run the course again, starting in January.