If Michael Runtz hadn’t been such a pest as a five-year old, thousands of Carleton students years later might have been deprived of one the best learning experiences of their undergraduate lives.
“My older sister Karen had a friend next door who had a playhouse in her backyard,” recalls the Carleton biology instructor. “I used to go over there and interrupt them until one day my sister’s friend complained to her mother, who — to distract me — gave me binoculars and my first Peterson Field Guide.”
The rest is (natural) history. By kindergarten Runtz was an avid birdwatcher, his interest turning a fellow kinder into an avid watcher as well. It’s someone Runtz is still in contact with today.
That infectious enthusiasm is not news to Carleton students. In his 17 years teaching at Carleton, Runtz has become a perennial registration favorite. Every year, the 900 spaces in his two natural history courses are quickly snapped up.
And students aren’t the only ones impressed: this year he is nominated for a TV Ontario award for Best Lecturer in Ontario and was a finalist for a Capital Educators’ Award. Last year he also won an award he holds dear: the Friends of Algonquin Park Directors’ Award, which in the past has been won by the likes of Pierre Trudeau.
Despite these accolades, Runtz is modest about his teaching. “It’s pretty simple what I do. I tell them the reality of nature. I open students’ eyes and imaginations by revealing what is actually out there. Plus I use an element of humour.”
His class is probably one of the few on campus where students can learn wolf calls. It’s a skill Runtz himself developed while working as an Algonquin Park naturalist beginning in 1972, leading wolf howls. He also prides himself on his moose call, especially the female, which he learned from master naturalist Tony Bubenik. “Tony said I had the best female call of anyone he ever taught.”
Runtz’s lectures include a lot of visual aids, most of them of his own making. “A picture stimulates the mind,” he says. Runtz will shortly be taking a sabbatical, spending a year tracing Ontario’s natural history from Hudson’s Bay to Point Pelee. He’ll be equipped with a new video camera he purchased with part of the $15,000 he was awarded from his 2004 Carleton University Teaching Achievement Award (he also bought an editing suite). Runtz plans to incorporate the material in future courses, and possibly also use it in a documentary series.
Runtz says that for him learning is a two-way street. “Carleton has opened up my world to a whole different group of people, biology researchers doing leading-edge work — Ken Storey, Lenore Fahrig, Mark Forbes to name a few — right here at Carleton, people as interesting as nature itself. I learn from them through osmosis. It’s a privilege to be working here.”
He lives and breathes his work, having recently moved onto a 23-acre property on Cranberry Lake, near Kingston, ON. “It’s on a part of the Canadian Shield called the Frontenac Axis that is rich, rich in natural history. It’s absolutely amazing.”
To Runtz’s list of published works — so far he has written titles on wolves, wildflowers, birds, and guides to his beloved Algonquin Park — is soon to be added a new book on beaver pond ecology.
Alex Wooley, BA/89, is the director of communications and development at Intermedia in Washington, DC.