Kids Having a Wild Time at Camp

At the age of 6, Jade Nguyen already advocates protecting wild animals.

She has spent the last week enrolled in Zoo Camp at the Santa Ana Zoo, and on Friday, after examining a coarse and dry alligator skin, she turned to her fellow campers and told them a little about preservation.

“It’s really not OK [to hunt], because if you kill them there won’t be any more alligators,” she said.

The Yorba Linda youngster is one of several hundred children learning about animal conservation, classification and behavior at the summer camp, sponsored by county community colleges.

“It’s a hands-on education, and the kids really have a lot of fun. And they get to experience conservation hands-on instead of from a book,” Davina Harrison, a 28-year-old counselor from Newport Beach, said.

During a camp session Friday, youngsters touched snakes, peered at hatching chicks in an incubator and performed a noontime sing-a-long for their parents while sporting monkey, zebra, panda and raccoon masks. Afterward, they munched edible “bird nests” made from chocolate, peanut butter and cereal.

Morning activities were a bit less glamorous. Campers shoveled “zoo poop” in a pen while hungry goats and lambs nudged them for snacks and strokes.

“My favorite thing here is cleaning up after the goats because you get to be with the goats,” said Ryan Haas, 5, of north Tustin.

Brittany Patch-DiFiore, 7, of Costa Mesa preferred the reptiles “because they’re cool and stuff.”

And Marshall Wilkinson, 5, of Newport Beach, favored the rodents. “Holding the hairless rat was the best because they really have some hair,” he said. “They have hair but they’re called hairless rats because you can’t see it.”

At the camp, learning masquerades as merriment, parents said.

“You can’t really call it summer school,” said Chris Wilkinson, mother of Marshall and his sister Caroline, 9, also a camper. “It’s learning in a very fun way.”

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