Photos by Connecticut Headshots • 860-593-0850 • www.connecticutheadshots.com
During the April school break, Roaring Brook Nature Center director Jay Kaplan introduced a reptilian friend to 6th-grader Ketan Badrinath and his brother Rohan, an 8th-grader. The students are Avon residents.
NURTURING AN APPRECIATION OF NATURE At Roaring Brook Nature Center, Kaplan stresses importance of environmental care By Bruce Deckert • Editor-in-Chief Avon Today • Canton Today • Simsbury Today
NEW YORK CITY seems an ironic place for a formative encounter with wildlife — but that is exactly the locale where Jay Kaplan, director of Roaring Brook Nature Center, learned to more fully appreciate nature. “I have been keenly interested in the natural world and wildlife since I was a young child,” Kaplan says. “I would visit my father’s family in the Bronx, three blocks from Yankee Stadium, and go to a park where people would feed squirrels and birds. These are early memories of being close to wildlife.” Kaplan grew up in suburban Long Island, where he and a friend would play in a wooded area that “is now a subdivision — this was my first introduction to finding toads and salamanders.” When he went to summer camp, while others played ball, he chased more salamanders. Since 1976, Kaplan has lived in a residence at the Nature Center on Gracey Road in Canton. He and his wife, Kate Simmons Kaplan, married in 1982 and have a son (Josh, 34) and a daughter (Sarah, 31). Josh and his wife Katelynn have a son (Jayden, 1). Jay Kaplan, who turns 70 in late May, began working at Roaring Brook Nature Center in October 1973 in the role of naturalist. He has served as director since 1975. Regarding his résumé before Roaring Brook: “I’ve been here 45 years — anything I did prior to that is a long time ago,” he quips. “As a child, a friend and I would observe and collect items from the natural world,” says Kaplan. “I remember having
COVER STORY a grasshopper collection, bringing home garter snakes that sometimes got loose in the house, and making a list of birds seen in our neighborhood — a list I recently uncovered.” Kaplan recalls that his mother once asked him why his love for animals didn’t lead him to become a veterinarian. “That was never my calling,” he says. “No one ever encouraged me, a kid growing up on Long Island, to continue in this field. It leads me to sometimes think that naturalists are often just born with that innate curiosity about the natural world.” A graduate of Cornell, Kaplan first heard about the Nature Center in a somewhat serendipitous way: He was “hanging around the graduate office” at Penn State University, where he earned his master’s degree in outdoor education, when he saw a job posting.
SCHOOL EMPHASIS BRINGS NATURE INTO FOCUS
“My experience as an environmental education major at Cornell gave me a thorough background in flora and fauna,” Kaplan says. “When I went to Penn State ... I learned how to communicate this natural history knowledge to others. Thus, upon graduation, I was well-positioned to [be] an environmental educator.” His work as an educator often takes him to schools in Avon, Canton, Simsbury and elsewhere. Roaring Brook Nature Center has been affiliated with The Children’s Museum of West Hartford (formerly the Science Center of Connecticut) since 1973, and the two facilities are
AVON TODAY • CANTON TODAY • SIMSBURY TODAY – www.TodayPublishing.net – MAY 2019
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