CAC Student presenting information on the NWRS.

CAC student starting interpretive talk at the Swallow Hollow Nature Trail.

Canisius College is a selective liberal arts university located in Buffalo, New York. Through generous funding from the Oishei Foundation, Michael Noonan, Professor of Animal Behavior at Canisius initiated a collaborative program with Iroquois National Wildlife Refuge designed to bring middle school children from Western New York schools to the refuge.

Dr. Noonan is the founder and director of the Canisius Ambassadors for Conservation (CAC), a program in which select college students are trained to provide pro-conservation lessons for school groups and the general public. Now in its seventh year, the CAC program had previously been linked with the Buffalo Zoo and focused its efforts primarily on the conservation of exotic species. This year, the program drew its inspiration from the Beyond the Boundaries workshop conducted for the National Wildlife Refuge Friends Groups at the National Conservation Training Center. After attending the meeting, Dr. Noonan made the commitment to tie the program to conservation efforts at Iroquois National Wildlife Refuge and the National Wildlife Refuge System.

Through a competitive process, five college students were selected for the program based on their conservation-focused essays and topical presentations in front of live audiences. The selected students along with Dr. Noonan then traveled to 11 national wildlife refuges where employees presented lectures, slide shows, and questions and answer sessions, which helped the students gain a better understanding and appreciation for refuge system management, purposes, concerns and issues. The CAC students then developed an educational program that could be presented to middle school students from western New York at the Iroquois National Wildlife Refuge. A total of 553 students from 23 different classes and 10 different schools traveled to the refuge to participate in the educational programs.