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Earth Day is always a special occasion at the Whitfield Wildlife Conservation Area.
This year, Whitfield has a special treat as a part of the free celebration this Friday and Saturday — a historic re-enactment of the U.S. Army Camel Corps’ stop near Belen, complete with live camels.
Texas-based camel expert Doug Baum will be on hand with dromedary and Bactrian camels from his Teas Camel Corps farm for the event. He will also speak to the possibility the land now occupied by WWCA may have been where the U.S. Camel Corps made camp in 1857
The land and marshes were a known “parada,” or stop in Spanish, along the famous Camino Real.
Teresa de Cherif, board chairwoman of the Valencia Soil and Water Conservation District Board of Supervisors, which owns and operates Whitfield, said bringing Baum and his camel cohorts to Valencia County is something she’d had on her mind for quite a while.
“Whitfield does Earth Day every year, so it’s been on my mind to try and reach a different audience,” Cherif said in a recent interview. “I know Doug Baum from seeing him present several times in the state, and being an armchair historian myself, his talks interested me.
“I knew the (U.S. Camel Corps) came up through the Middle Rio Grande on their course, so we wanted to be sure people could discover this secret history of our area.”
Baum, a former zookeeper, has run the Texas Camel Corps since 1997. In that time, he has made it his mission to spread the history of the U.S. Camel Corps in Texas and across the U.S. Southwest as well as other states and international locales such as London, Morocco and Saudi Arabia.
“As I approach the third decade dedicated to this, I’m reinvigorated to get to a new place like the Whitfield,” he said in a recent phone interview. “We’ve done the program in New Mexico before, but being in Belen is very exciting because we get to share this history with the school-age children for the first time.
“I think (the presentations) bring interest and pride to things that happen locally. Local histories like this one add up to the bigger story of history. We’re lucky to be able to tell this story where it actually happened,” he concluded.
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For folks with mobility issues, the VSWCD will offer a special shuttle inside the conservation area to the camel site.
Children can earn a Junior Camel Corp Ranger Badge. The event will also include a land acknowledgment by Laguna tribal member Rebecca Touchin at 11:30 p.m. Saturday morning.
