Local students learn how to make maple syrup at Dinosaur Hill

By Erin McClary
C & G Staff Writer

ROCHESTER — While some call maple sugaring “the sweet goodbye of winter,” a group of local second-graders are welcoming the concept as a new way to enjoy one of the sweetest natural resources of the great outdoors.

Maple sugaring is widely known as a tradition started by the American Indians and later adopted and adapted by some of the country’s first settlers. It’s one of several traditions people celebrate today as a result of the area’s native inhabitants and pioneers uniting resources.

On March 4, second-graders at Holy Family in Rochester took a field trip to the city’s Dinosaur Hills Nature Preserve, where they learned that making homemade maple syrup is so easy that anyone with a maple tree in their yard can tap through the bark and draw sap. The trip correlates with science lessons they’re currently studying.

“We use it as part of a science lesson, but there is an element of history,” said Fran Cunningham, second-grade teacher at Holy Family. “They’re concepts that adhere to each other.”

Cunningham said some of the things her class has discussed about the tradition of maple sugaring include how the American Indians collected sap and made it into sugar, how that method changed when the pioneers introduced new concepts, and how maple syrup is made today.

The bittersweet lesson students learned March 4 is that the window to actually collect the sap is small. The season for maple sugaring takes place between  the middle of February and the middle or end of March, when the sap flowing inside most maple trees is sweet enough to turn into syrup. And the weather has to be just right.

The good thing, explained Barbara Bray, a Dinosaur Hill naturalist, is that Michigan’s weather makes for a hearty maple-sugaring season, as the region’s inconsistent temperatures have what it takes to get sap flowing. Temperatures need to be below freezing at night and above freezing during the day in order for the sap to flow. Thankfully, on March 4 Bray read from her thermometer that it was 36 degrees at around 10:45 a.m., when the kids when out to tap a nearby maple tree.

Before heading out into Dinosaur Hill’s six acres of outdoor preserve, the students gathered to hear about sap and how maple sugaring works. Bray explained that water moves through the roots of the tree and into the leaves, where it meets with carbon dioxide components. “Every leaf is a little sugar factory,” she explained.

Then Bray allowed them to sample sap in its raw form — basically, sugary water. “Squirrels will bite the ends of branches to lick the sap,” she told them.

Next, the kids participated in a “mystery syrup” sampling, where they blindly tasted two types: locally made, real maple syrup, and a popular brand of syrup that doesn’t contain any sap at all, Bray said.

“Tastes like trees,” one student said to describe the real stuff. “Tastes like water put on a fire and then put back in the fridge,” another said.

Once the sampling was complete, the students trekked out to the property and took turns hand-drilling a tiny hole into a tree. Once that was complete, each took a swing at hammering in a spile, a funnel used to allow sap to travel from the tree into a container. At Dinosaur Hill, they use wire and attach empty milk crates to collect the flowing sap.

“This method is essentially still used nowadays,” Bray explained. In areas where maple syrup is mass-produced, companies will string plastic tubing from tree to tree to collect sap. Bray said it takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup.

Once all the sap is collected, it must be boiled down in order to reach the consistency of syrup. Bray said that once the liquid reached 219 degrees, it’s ready to be cooled and poured onto pancakes. If it boils longer, the liquid will harden, resulting in little maple candies.

For the nine years that Cunningham has taught at Holy Family, she said classes have been taking field trips to Dinosaur Hill to learn the science and history of maple sugaring. She said actually showing children the lesson is a great way to promote learning.

You can reach Staff Writer Erin McClary at emcclary@candgnews.com or at (586) 279-1118.