Birding Behind Bars: on teaching nature courses in prison

Birding Behind Bars

On teaching nature courses in prison

Written in the fall of 2025 to be read as a presentation, so the verbiage is rather colloquial. This article will be online for a limited time only.

What happens when you try to inspire a love of nature in a place with no windows, no binoculars, and no access to the outdoors? I found out when I started volunteering to teach bird and nature courses at a federal prison.

In mid-August 2024, I was at Hazelton US Penitentiary, sitting in the Federal Correctional Institution. Surrounded by AA instructors and a persuasive writing teacher, I was taking notes on how to structure educational programs and the extensive list of what not to do, or say, or wear, or bring into the prison.

This is about birds, but only marginally. Really, it’s a talk about federal prisons, sharing nature with unconventional audiences, and even, as controversial as it might sound, finding ways to celebrate invasive species. Consider yourself warned.

This is my journey over the past year that combined birds, people, and a place I’d barely thought about before—and the ways that this experience has deepened my love of birding.

Finding my way to Hazelton

We moved to Bruceton Mills last year. We have gorgeous views of the Milky Way on clear nights, but there’s always a faint glow to our southeast from the lights at Hazleton. It’s quiet, but constant.

When I started scouting roads for birding around Bruceton, I would be in sight of the prison regularly. It’s a huge open stretch of land on one of the highest points around. I often wondered what birds ended up on or over those grounds, and if anyone inside had ever been a birder.

That was as much thought as I’d given it, until one day when I came across an article about issues in local prisons. The author had worked in the system and had written something along the lines of “if you’ve never seen what it’s like inside prison, then you probably shouldn’t have an opinion on it.”

And that was my catalyst. The US prison system isn’t something I’ve thought about in any considerable way before, but it struck me how little I knew about the enormous facility within sight of my house, let alone prison life as a whole. So, I started with some Googling.

Hazelton Federal Correctional Complex

Hazelton Federal Correctional Complex is actually made up of two main facilities: the U.S. Penitentiary (USP) and the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI). The penitentiary is the higher-security side, with just over 1,400 people housed there, plus 150 more at its adjoining minimum-security “camp.” Camps like this provide inmate labor both inside the prison and for off-site work programs, and the people there are often serving time for white-collar crimes.

The FCI is the medium-security side of the complex, and it’s even larger, with more than 2,000 people total. That includes around 1,500 in the main facility and about 500 in the Secure Female Facility (SFF). The SFF is notable because it’s one of only eight federal women’s facilities in the entire U.S., and it also houses transgender and nonbinary individuals.

Quick aside: They are moving out of using the word “inmates” and instead saying “incarcerated persons.” I was told that last year in training, but it seems that the staff is not switching over very quickly. I admit to finding myself using the phrases interchangeably, but I’m strongly in favor of not turning a descriptor into a person’s identity.

There should be about 1,000 staff at full capacity, but with years-long hiring freezes in place, Hazleton has 700-odd staff members.

For comparison, Kingwood is the largest town in the county with about 2,900 people. The prison has nearly 4,500 staff and inmates combined. Realizing how big – and yet how invisible – this community was made me curious about how to connect.

So, I called them up and asked about it, and turns out, it is pretty simple to do. Anyone who completes training and passes the necessary background checks and security measures can volunteer to support educational, vocational, and recreational activities in a federal prison.

Preparing a cirriculum to teach in a penitentiary

I was put on the spot during that first phone call when the officer asked what I’d teach about. I said the first thing that came to mind: a course about birds and nature. The response was a quick yes, and that the inmates were always looking for interesting programming, particularly in the female facility.

I started the process of becoming a volunteer. I would do the training and paperwork, design a curriculum, and get it approved.

This was going to go under the recreational category, so I didn’t have to meet specific criteria to go towards a GED or anything like that. Instead, students who enrolled in the class would get a positive credit of sorts on their records that can be used as a favorable reflection of their time in incarceration, potentially contributing to shortened sentences. I could structure my course however I wanted and for as long as I wanted. That was about all the direction I was given.

Solving restrictive puzzles

I started playing around with a six-week program that I could fit into a stretch of time when I was home this spring. And that’s when I hit my biggest roadblock: We couldn’t be outside. I had to figure out how to teach nature in a virtually windowless room. That was when I really started digging into how to teach a course that connects people to nature when they have extremely limited access to it.

I brainstormed several iterations of a curriculum. A decade ago, I taught special education for a year, in a classroom that didn’t have an allotment for the textbooks the students were supposed to have, and the principal told me to teach whatever I wanted. That year, with such frustratingly limited support, my ultimate goal became making the students fall in love with learning. I decided I would take a similar approach here. Through the teachings, I wanted to open up my students’ minds to thinking about systems in nature, and fall in love with the chasing of curiosities.

But there was a balance to be struck, and I hit another wall. I was surprised to learn how hard it was to donate resources to the institution’s libraries. I originally thought I’d donate a slew of field guides and resource books, and design part of the class to teach how to use those so that the students could then reference them as they wanted going forward. But that wasn’t going to be the case. And beyond that, I couldn’t bring teaching aids into the classroom. The extent of materials I could use was a whiteboard and handouts that I emailed to a staff member beforehand to print for the class.

I did not have the confidence in my drawing skills to sketch bird ID features for any group of students, so that option was out. I decided it could be a good thing to have that restriction if I wanted to achieve my goals. In many cases, falling in love with the wonder of birds and nature doesn’t include identifying them. Was I really trying to make a prison full of birder inmates? Nope. So I needed to think about this in a way that wasn’t a bird ID 101 course. I wasn’t going to make birders; I wanted to spark curiosity.

Incorporating wellness through nature

I consulted some friends and colleagues who taught about birds in different capacities. I had long conversations with Holly Merker, the author of Ornitherapy, a book that bridges the gap between bird ID and human well-being. She’s also the founder of the Mindful Birding Network. On their site, Mindful Birding is described as follows:

“Why Mindful Birding? Mounting scientific research shows that deepening our experiences with nature by intentionally slowing down, engaging our senses, and being aware of the present moment holds a myriad of benefits to overall human wellness.”

I decided to make a recipe of sorts: one part natural history, one part human wellness, and started to build lesson plans. My first class began with an introduction to birds, wildlife, and habitats of Appalachia. I included a section on how to observe – not to identify, but just to take notice of nature. From there, we would go into a discussion of ways to wonder why something is the way it is.

A discussion-based approach

Then came addressing the next challenge in the curriculum. In the training, it was pointed out that, not only do inmates come from all walks of life, but they also come from all educational backgrounds. One officer put it bluntly: “You’re going to be teaching someone who hasn’t learned to read next to someone with a PhD.”

The solution to this complication came pretty easily to me. I wasn’t required to give exams or grades, luckily. So I decided to take a fully discussion-based approach to each 90-minute class. I made an outline of points to hit, but intentionally kept it very basic and open-ended so that we could one, talk through the main points verbally, and two, so that there was some liberty to mold the conversation as we went. Then, I created a second handout to pass out after the main discussion with a simple worksheet or two, and finally, a third handout with extensive journal and reflection questions for optional homework between sessions.

I also added a simple start and end to each set of journal questions, asking students to do a brief self-analysis of how they were feeling at the start; for example: How happy am I on a scale of 1-10? Am I feeling stressed about anything right now? And then answer the same questions after spending at least a few minutes focusing on nature. That’s a mental health check that I learned from Jason Hall and Dexter Patterson, the co-hosts of the Bird Joy Podcast.

Measuring the unknowns

I was sure that I could blabber on about birds for the full time, so I knew I could fill in as much space as I needed. However, what I had no idea about was how this topic of birds and nature would be received, or how engaged and willing to share the students would be. The officer in the education department who became my point of contact assured me that he’d start by selecting a group of students who were generally very interested in the prison’s programming, and, as he put it, would give me an easy time. I was really thankful for that, but it still didn’t give me too much clarification on what to expect. I submitted a full outline of the six-week course for approval, but decided to wait to finish each class’s handouts until I saw how the first one went.

The rest of the course covered broad topics about birds. Week two went into bird shapes and silhouettes, and a little bit about birdsong and communication, with the aim of starting to think about different bird families and why they might look the way they do. Other weeks covered the topics of migration, diets and how birds eat, parenting and nesting, and survival strategies. Each week used examples from various Appalachian habitat types. Overall, I was trying to paint this full picture of what was happening around here in birdlife, and map connections to other forms of nature.

A discussion-based approach

Entering the classroom

The officer put out the call for signups, telling me that the volunteer-led classrooms had a maximum of 12 students. A few days later, he reported to me that more than 60 inmates signed up for the class. He offered to select the 12 who made the cut himself, which was much easier than me trying to come up with a criterion for who should get to take the course. I took it as a great sign that there was interest in what I had planned.

The first week finally came. I was busy with other work and too rushed to get too nervous about it. I got to the FCI, swapped my license for a volunteer badge, went through the metal detector, and was escorted into a big grassy area that was the center of the Secure Female Facility. Buildings ran nearly the entire way around it, with large housing units in the corners, various offices, the dining hall, commissary, and health units around the perimeter, and the classrooms on the far side. Movements between units ran sort of like school periods, and every 90 minutes or so, there’d be a rotation for everyone according to their schedules. Volunteers arrived between movements, so the whole area seemed vacant as I was escorted to the classroom.

The walkways were completely filled with house sparrows and starlings, already actively nest building in mid-April. Red-winged blackbirds sat calling from the far fences. Turkey vultures and a red-tailed hawk circled overhead.

The officer gave me my handouts, took me to a small room with simple desks and a podium, and we waited for students to arrive. He checked off the names of twelve women who came and sat down, and with that, I was on my own to start teaching. ESL classes were happening across the hallway, so we closed the door to help focus.

My first cohort: Finding acceptance in what doesn't belong

The group seemed generally excited and friendly, and a few had already thanked me for taking the time to volunteer. I started by introducing myself and asking to go around the room to get everyone’s name and where they were from. Two things struck me from the start. One, every student seemed pretty surprised to be asked where they were from. Two, not a single one was from anywhere close to West Virginia.

The group was widespread across the contiguous US, with two exceptions. One woman, who went by the nickname Frenchie (and had a French bulldog sticker on her water bottle to boot), was from France, lived in Canada for a chunk of her life, and then had spent several years in the US. The other, the last one to introduce herself, was from Guam.

It just so happened that I had recently been researching Guam Kingfisher reintroduction efforts to prepare for a podcast interview. (Side note, there are several zoological institutions in the US participating in that effort to save a species that has gone extinct in the wild, and the National Aviary in Pittsburgh is leading the charge on that. You can see several critically endangered birds at the aviary, including some kingfishers. They’re known as Sihek (sigh-HECK) on the island.)

I asked her if she knew anything about the endangered birds on Guam and the cause for their demise, the brown tree snake, a nonnative snake that has taken over the island and wrecked it ecologically. Her face lit up, and she said “Yes! They are everywhere!” The rest of the classroom shared our surprise that the two of us had this connection of knowledge.

And with that, we dove into an animated discussion. Everyone had questions about how a snake could arrive on an island and take over so extensively that everyone who lived there knew it so well. We talked about habitats and ecological balance, and the effects that a disruption in that balance can have.

There was no denying the fact that starlings and house sparrows were going to be some of the main species we talked about — they were literally within arm’s reach for the students throughout the week, eating, nesting, roosting, and carrying out their entire life cycles. So the stream of conversation lent itself to talking about these prolific invasive species. We talked about how they likely got to America and why they might be choosing to live within the prison grounds.

When I mentioned the aviary in Pittsburgh, I was met with some blank stares, and I added the context that it was less than two hours away. Most of the students barely knew where West Virginia is, let alone where in the state we were.

I crudely drew the state map on the board to show them. But this broke my heart. I can’t imagine not being able to have some feeling of physical place, let alone in the most trying times of your life. As a birding guide, finding grounding wherever I am leading is at the core of what I’m doing. And I do that mostly through attempting to learn and impart an understanding of the natural world that surrounds me and my clients, wherever we are.

Realizing my why

Up until that point, when I’d mentioned that I was starting to teach at the prison and people asked me some form of “uh, why?”, I didn’t have much of an answer. All I knew was that it was something that affects a lot of lives in the United States that I wanted to know more about, but I didn’t know where that would take me or how I could have any sort of particularly positive impact as a volunteer.

In that first class, my “why” clicked: we were finding belonging — through birds — in a place designed to separate people.

We were going to try to find that sense of place and, ultimately, belonging within it. And birds were going to guide us there.

In that classroom, there was no way we were going to discuss these nonnative subjects as something we’d demonize. The parallels between those invasive species and the women in front of me were not lost.

As the course progressed, when we dove into different aspects of natural history, they took the form of looking at why adaptations might’ve formed or been learned. We always discussed how features and habits improved survivability, at a minimum, and beyond that, maybe even help birds flourish. Writing journal prompts became easy. We’d tie those reflections on nature to our own lives. We were talking about adaptation, survival, beauty, and resilience — both in nature and in ourselves.

Building a love of birds and nature

I’d start each class by asking if anyone wanted to share from their reflections from the past week, and pretty much everyone at some point had something they wanted to share or discuss.

And of course, we also told stories and talked about bird and wildlife observations. After a few weeks, barn swallows rolled in to join the house sparrows in the rafters. In fact, there were some cliff swallows, too, making one fun ID example. We built a “turkey vulture mediation” around Katie Fallon’s trick to count between turkey vulture’s wingbeats — something I learned from her in the local young birder walks. Of course, vultures earned another spot in our lineup of special birds to discuss each week, due to both their daily presence and their misunderstood natures. Students found rose-breasted grosbeaks, bluebirds, and picked up on the daily habits of the turkeys that wandered close to the recreation yard.

There were other wildlife stories, too. There was a tame groundhog that sometimes walked into the housing units, apparently, and inmates loved to feed it. Also, the kitchen staff had an entire family of skunks living in the dumpster, and they kept a friendly eye out for them when they started their breakfast shifts at 4 AM. From what I understood, the prison staff let all of this go, and everyone seemed to have a soft spot for their localized critters.

Bird nerds: convergent evolution?

Now, as time went by, I found it funny that a bit of bird-loving culture was apparent in my students, too. I knew this from their enthusiasm, but even more, because I learned they became known as the birders (or at least bird-lovers) around the grounds. When a house sparrow fell out of a nest or a chickadee flew into the commissary, my students got called in to help. We did a crash course (no pun intended) on catching and releasing a trapped bird, and had the full “what-to-do-with-a-baby-bird” talk.

Birds beyond the classroom

I always tried to add in some “wow” facts about birds each week, telling a mix of the more extreme bird facts from around the world and some that were related to birds that were easy to see from where we were. Inmates don’t get outside every day or even week, so we discussed birds in cultural aspects and other ways, too. Students shared about their childhood and past experiences. One was Mexican-American and lived in New Orleans for a lot of her life, and had a particularly rich arsenal of stories about the symbolic aspects of birds in her life.

Frenchie was one of the most enthusiastic students, and she told me at one point that her birthday was the following week and how excited she was to spend part of it in our class. Well, sometimes the units go into lockdown, and volunteers aren’t allowed to come in. That was the case on Frenchie’s birthday, and I was so sad to miss it. The following week, I told her that as soon as she came in. She didn’t miss a beat — she ended up going for a hospital procedure in Morgantown that day, so not only did she get to spend her birthday leaving the prison, but she also got to see the region and birdwatch from the car to and from her appointment.

The true impact of volunteers in prison classrooms

My attendance was great throughout the course, but I did lose a few students along the way because they were transferred to other institutions. I never knew details – and by the way, I don’t know a single reason why any students were incarcerated in the first place – but there’d simply be an empty seat, and someone would fill me in that they’d left Hazelton. No one was released while I was there, but I do know that the average sentencing for incarcerated persons at the Secure Female Facility is 5-6 years, and more than 90% are not serving life sentences. Still, that uncertainty felt pretty constant and jarring to me.

The classes flew by, and we always had to cut conversations short when they ended. The course was flat-out fun and energizing. Students were prepared for it to end, but were begging me to come back and teach more in the future. I was happy to hear similarly positive feedback from the prison staff, who heard from my students on a regular basis, too.

I took the summer off from volunteering simply because I wasn’t home enough to stick to a schedule. I told them I’d be back in the fall, and I was given a few choices for how to continue. I could do another course with the same inmates, building off of our first course; I could repeat my first course with new students; or, per my request, I could actually get to lead outdoor walks with male inmates at the camp, who are permitted to walk the grounds for their jobs and aren’t in closed housing units.

I am in the process of getting approval for the nature walks with the camp and am committed to teaching another course at the female facility, though I’m torn on working with the same students or new ones. Either way, I am really excited to continue volunteering.

It took until my second annual volunteer training session, after I’d gained the experience of actually teaching a course, to grasp some of the concepts the staff stressed to volunteers. Frankly, it had felt a little weird to me to offset a staffing shortage with volunteer labor, like it was a tax of time and effort to artificially support a government institution. And honestly, that’s still something I’m grappling with.

But there are more reasons than that for community volunteers to have a presence in the prison system. We provide a bridge between inmates and staff. Incarcerated persons prove time and again that they are much more likely to trust someone who chooses to spend time with them than a member of the prison staff who is paid to enforce their sentence. For that reason, inmates are much more likely to confide in a volunteer when they are being abused or need help. We get a lot of training on how to handle those situations.

Plus, in most cases, the first outreach program an inmate opts into is one led by a volunteer. That creates a pathway that can lead to enrollment in other programs, like GED classes or rehab.

There’s no doubt that inmates deeply appreciate people who choose to spend time with them, and I feel that directly each time I’m in the prison. And that’s a final role that volunteers fill: a role of compassion, of human connection, and of bringing diverse perspectives and thoughts to a closed society. To contribute to a sense of place, of belonging.

A call to action

I have a few final takeaways I want to share. First, I’ve promised the staff that I would give a pitch to you, reader, to volunteer at a federal institution. If you have any interest in volunteering in the prison system yourself, I highly encourage you to contact your local institution. I can fully attest to how worthwhile it is both for inmates and volunteers themselves.

If you want to teach a birds and nature course like I did, I will gladly share my curriculum and handouts with you. But I also want to stress that you could teach any kind of course you have knowledge of and passion for. There was someone coming to Hazelton this summer to teach opera classes. The opportunities are endless.

Also, I encourage you to consider introducing a love of birds to audiences outside of our birding circle. Whether that’s a senior center, school classroom, hospital, rehab center, shelter, or any organization that you’re connected to…this experience has really taught me how much good there is to spread the joy of birds and nature in unconventional places, and I’d love to challenge you to think about what those potential places in your life might be.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that connecting people to birds and nature isn’t about memorizing names and ID features, particularly when you’re aiming to draw people into loving birds or becoming birders.

It’s about appreciating what’s in front of you.
It’s about not being afraid to get excited by the ordinary.
It’s about asking why and how as much as who.

Start with what’s closest. Celebrate what shows up.

Invite discussion, participation, and storytelling. And above all, regardless of whether it leads to answers, simply take time to wonder.

Birds gave us a way to belong, even behind walls. And that’s something every person deserves to feel.

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