Tue Feb 09 2010
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Frankfort Face: John Baggerman
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After 30 years at a desk job, John Baggerman was ready for the great outdoors – though he hadn’t realized it yet.
Happenstance led him to go back to school, switch careers and become an educator at the Salato Wildlife Center.
John, 63 of Lexington, spent about 30 years as a customer support manager at IBM. After he retired, he decided to earn another degree.
He says he enjoyed working on computers at IBM and assisting customers. However, at the end of his career there, John was an administrator and said it was less enjoyable supervising contracts.
“Ninety-nine percent of it I really enjoyed,” he said. “But the customers could be very demanding. What you did yesterday didn’t count any more. They needed it today. That got old.”
After he retired in 2004, a friend asked John to go on a three-week canoeing trip to Canada. He’d been a Boy Scout and always enjoyed the outdoors and decided to go.
That trip rekindled his interest in nature and the outdoors, he says. He’s been back every summer.
“I did a lot of outdoorsy stuff but I went away to college and kind of stopped doing that,” John said. “I went down another path, that was also interesting and stayed with that.”
But pursuing a career in conservation education hadn’t occurred to him.
“It never even crossed my mind,” he says.
His favorite classes at the University of Kentucky were entomology and dendrology – the study of insects and trees respectively. John said he’s long had an interest in insects since he made a bug collection as part of an eighth-grade biology project.
“What really fascinates me is the scale of it,” he said. “There’s so many working parts on insects who are so small you can barely see – they are just a speck to the naked eye. But they are complicated creatures with six legs, antenna and compound eyes.”
As his interests were revived, John said he decided to teach children about nature and the environment.
He got a degree in natural resource conservation and management from the University of Kentucky in 2008. He’s now a conservation education program leader at Salato.
“I have a strong conviction that people make a lot of bad decisions relative to our planet,” he said. “We’re out of touch with it. After awhile, it dawned on me that maybe I can help.”
John was a volunteer at Salato for four summers and got a job as an education program leader this spring. He uses a variety of tools and lessons to help visitors learn about insects, mammals and plants.
On Wednesday John introduced dozens of students from Garrard County elementary and Bluegrass Headstart to the black bear. He stood in front of a mounted and preserved young female that weighed about 150 pounds.
He used a wood tray to show students what bears eat – the tray was covered in glass and contained nuts, berries and bugs. In addition, John also let them touch and play with a black bear pelt, a reproduction skull, rubber bear feces and an authentic severed paw.
A baby in a stroller rubbed the pelt when John let him touch it.
“They might have a kitty at home but the texture of the bear’s fur is rough,” he said.
The skull and paw show students bears have teeth and thick pads on the their paws instead of shoes, he said.
“They learn that animals are not totally different from them,” John said. “Instead of telling them we give them a hands-on experience.”
One of the most popular items in his array of props is the rubber feces, he said.
“Some kids think it’s the coolest thing in the world,” John said.
John also leads other programs and will sometimes take nets down to the marsh exhibit and let children scoop up bugs and other marsh critters.
“After they pull out some of the animals that live on bottom, they are amazed,” he said. “They learn this little guy will turn into a deerfly or a dragonfly. It’s an eye-opening experience for them.”
Interacting with the children is fun, and John said he’s also learned that attitudes have changed a lot since he was a student.
“The sense the world is one system and every living thing is a part of it is more a part of today’s consciousness,” John said. “Now there is a strong awareness everything is interrelated.”
He credited it to incremental changes that began with the efforts of writer Henry David Thoreau and naturalist John Muir.
However, John said he is still concerned about a number of environmental issues – primarily the over consumption of resources.
“For anybody who lives in the U.S. and drives a car and has a home, it doesn’t take much to consume more than your share,” he said.
“Developing countries are playing ‘me too’ and they want to get on board and consume just as much as we do. We are going to flat-out destroy the environment and run out of resources if we don’t take a wiser approach.”
John admits he’s probably just as guilty as anyone – he owns a house and two cars. He drives a Toyota Corolla and his wife drives a Dodge Caravan.
However, he said he tries to make improvements by using compact fluorescent lights at home, recycling and participating in community supported agriculture. He also works with the Earth ministries committee at his church to save energy and improve efficiency.
“I think people are smart enough to understand how all that fits together and make logical decisions,” John said. “My aim is to help them understand.”
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