Now, she’s worried she will never get the chance to track her school’s pack. “Extracurricular activities like TREE Club give you the opportunity to get involved and active when you’re not stuck in the classroom.”īecause of COVID-19 precautions and this year’s usually cold and snowy spring, Birch Wright hasn’t yet had the chance to go out tracking wolves from the Timberline pack in the Boise National Forest. “We live in a world where kids are disconnected, and you can’t begin to protect anything that you don’t have a relationship with,” he said. “TREE Club is something that means everything to me,” said retired teacher Dick Jordan, who sponsored the first student TREE Club in Jerome in 1990 and brought the club to Boise High School and then Timberline in recent years. “It was a way for students to connect with the environment and wild species, especially because it is a wolf, which is our mascot, and because of how big of a role wolves play in our ecosystem.”īefore Birch Wright and her friends attended Timberline, some previous students even got to go on field trips with their teacher and a wolf tracker near Lowman, where they looked for wolves, listened for their calls, analyzed their scat and urine and followed their prints in the snow.
“It is just a really cool thing to have,” said Birch Wright, who is a member of the school’s TREE Club, which stands for Teens Restoring Earth’s Environment. The mascot is the wolf, which led to a real pack of wolves living in the nearby Boise National Forest being named for, symbolically adopted by and studied at the high school. Timberline High School student Annie Birch Wright felt a connection to her school’s mascot because it wasn’t just another generic animal.