For Olson, it’s been a career celebrating the woods

Denny Olson has been teaching folks both young and old alike about the great outdoors for decades now.

Olson, 75, grew up in Minnesota poking around the woods in that great state, graduating from the University of Minnesota with twin master’s degrees in zoology and geology.

Early in his career he worked for outdoor education schools in Minnesota and Wisconsin, including the Sigurd-Olson Outdoor Education Center where he went on the road doing theatrical outdoor education programs.

That eventually led him to strike out on his own as a self-employed naturalist educator, where over the course of decades he did thousands of school assembly programs, as various cool characters he created like the Critter Man, the Mad Herbalist, Avian Guano and Dr. Loonacy, just to name a few.

He figures he flew more than 1 million miles over his career.

Local folks may remember him as the Critter Man character he played on local television from 2001-2005.

Olson eventually ended up in Idaho, working in public affairs for their fish and game department a few years until he moved to Montana.

“It felt like home,” he said, noting that Northwest Montana has about 90% of the same plants as Minnesota.

He rented a cabin in the Swan Valley in the vicious winter on ’95-’96 and recalled they had to use a bulldozer to clear the snow into the cabin. He continued with his school programs, but over the years the budgets for supplemental education changed and the number of schools dwindled. But he continued to teach and write, penning five educational books and more recently, doing educational films.

He joined the Flathead Audubon Society and serves on its board.

Birds have always been a big part of his life. His graduate work was on loons. Olson can mimic more than 200 bird calls.

“I inherited my whistling ability from my father,” he said.

Today he still works part-time for the Flathead Audubon as its conservation educator.

“I’m liking I so much,” he said. “I don’t have plans of quitting anytime soon.”

For Olson, teaching for Audubon is a full circle; one of his first jobs out of college was teaching for an Audubon center in Minnesota.

As one might imagine, he’s an avid birder. One of his favorite species is the raven, which has 64 distinct calls. Put two of the calls together, he notes, and you get about 4,000 variations. String together three of those and it’s in the hundreds of thousands.

In other words, ravens are extremely intelligent.

Another favorite is the calliope hummingbird. The small bird is about the size of one’s thumb, yet its brain is about 1/24th of its bodyweight.

By comparison, a human’s brain is about 1/46th of its bodyweight.

That bird brainpower, with neurons that are five times faster than ours, allows it to make incredibly fast calculations as it buzzes along at 40 mph, stopping on a dime to gently land on a branch or hover over a flower to drink nectar.

“It’s easy to look around and see we (humans) are not that special,” he said. “I’m not trying to disparage humans, I happen to be one.”

But having said that, a good walk in the woods among the birds can instill a little humility into one’s life.

And that’s just fine with Olson.

Olson will lead a birding in Glacier National Park class this Saturday at 9 a.m. To sign up, visit the Glacier Institute website at https://glacierinstitute.org. Click on winter programs.