Luke Reese didn’t take an easy route back to Austin. In fact, if this was Olympic diving, he would have added a pike position and twist to make it trickier.

The Jay C. Hormel Nature Center’s new director/naturalist, Reese crammed an awful lot of life into a fairly short time. Getting a new job, moving and having a baby — Luna — with his wife, Anna, is after all quite a bit to tackle.

“Inside of a month we found out I had a new job, packed, had a baby, moved, started a new job,” Reese said, laughing. “That’s a lot of transition.”

Reese took over the position from long-time director Larry Dolphin on Aug. 24 when Dolphin retired, but Reese isn’t new to the nature center.

In 2005-06 Reese was an intern with the nature center. Despite 11 years away from the nature center, Reese returned to a feeling of familiarity mixed with the excitement of working with new things.

“The first week we went over some nuts and bolts about administrative stuff,” Reese said. “Having been an intern, a lot of the programming stuff, all I needed were refreshers.”

“It’s still a crash course,” Reese continued. “He shows me how to do it, and he’s done and it’s like, ‘Okay, how did he do that?”

Part of that familiarity in the job and the center has been the familiarity of the faces at the nature center, many of whom Reese knew from his internship with the center.

“It’s been really good,” Reese said. “Kim Underwood has really been helpful. She’s great to work for. The staff — Julie (Champlin), Maria (Anderson), Ben (Sherman) have all made it much, much more easier.”

Time in between

Since 2006 when his internship came to an end, Reese has been more than busy.

After leaving the nature center, he finished his degree in forestry at the University of Minnesota and then got a job with the university in forest economics.

While he enjoyed the job, Reese saw it wasn’t the fit he was hoping for.

“I enjoyed it, I was good at it, but I got into natural resources to be outside, not to be behind a computer,” Reese said.

Reese got out of that job and then made a deal with his wife. Whenever one of them got a job, that’s when they would move.

That move took them down to an Arizona border town with Mexico. Reese’s wife, Anna, got a job teaching in Nogales, Arizona.

From there Reese got a job with Americorp with the Nature Conservancy; however, it was only going to be a year-long position. After that, Reese taught seventh-grade science before returning to the Nature Conservancy.

“At the end of that year I found out that the Nature Conservancy was going to hire this preserve manager position and I was really interested in that,” Reese said. “[I] went back to the Nature Conservancy and I was there for another two years until this came up.”

What Reese maybe didn’t know at the time was that all the different things he was doing in Arizona were setting him up for the work he would be doing with the nature center.

“I had no idea what I was going to get into when I went to Arizona and it turned out it gave me a lot of the experience I would need for this,” Reese said. “Administrative experience, land management experience and even education experience. I couldn’t have planned it any better, although it certainly wasn’t a plan; it just sort of happened.”

Hit the ground — sprinting

Reese isn’t getting a chance to simply ease into his new position, not when there is a $7 million interpretive center being built near the entrance of the nature center.

Reese leaned back in his chair and glanced out the window in his office, smiling as he watched briefly the new building, which is nearly enclosed and still on track for an April 22 grand opening.

“I’m jumping into the middle of the building project so it’s fantastic,” Reese said. “It’s this great period of transition.”

Reese is embracing the challenge of the new interpretive center, despite the stress it adds to his new position.

“It’s stressful but it’s fun because it’s new. It’s this new building, new place,” he said. “It’s going to be exciting getting in there. I can walk in there and can see where the new office space is, where my office is going to be and where the exhibit space is going to be, these new beautiful classrooms and it’s just like pinch myself a little bit how lucky we are to have that space over there and to help out getting it completed is pretty fun.”

Reese points to a Feb. 23 date for the total enclosure of the building, provided the schedule keeps up. After that the inside will be completed and the exhibits will then be installed.

It’s a lot to handle.

“The education, that’s easy, that’s fun,” Reese said. “That new building, that certainly has been a big challenge.”

It’s not the only challenge, however.

As director and naturalist there will be several items that will pop up down the line that Reese will have to tackle, but he’s looking for to it including possible land acquisitions, prairie restorations and continuing to boost the educational opportunities at the center.

Reese points to that last part as the part he looks forward to: finding ways to meet the challenges of further educating the youth that come to the center.

“There’s a lot of challenges they are going to have to face and the more equipped they are to face those challenges, the better all of us are going to be,” Reese said. “To me, that’s really run and really refreshing working with kids. They ask some really fun questions and see them getting excited about the little things. All the stress with the new building just kind of melts away.”

Reese also wants to continue pushing the intern programming, explaining just how important it is not only to the center, but those who take part.

“Interns are doing all sorts of cool things,” Reese explained after they have left the nature center. “Working for the DNR, doing nature photography, leading bird tours in Alaska — that’s just three of them. There are a lot of neat things so the internship program and being a former intern and having had found success through that program, I really look forward to continuing that.”

Coming back home

It was a long road, but Reese and his family’s return to Austin seems like providence at this point. All the transition, all the adjusting, was just a way of guiding them back to Minnesota.

It’s that very transition, Reese said, that points to that fact.

“That was the other impetus,” Reese said. “In Arizona we were away from family and so coming back home we’re closer to family. Having this job open up at this time, it was meant to be.”

Nature center looking for volunteers

As the $7 million interpretive center moves toward completion in the early quarter of next year, new director/naturalist Luke Reese is looking to find the help needed to keep it and the nature center rolling.

He’s hoping that comes in the form of volunteers.

“We’re going to need a lot of volunteer help,” Reese said. “That’s one thing that’s high on my radar right now. Try to really put the word out that we’re going to be looking for a lot of volunteers.”

Estimates show that the nature center has in the realm of about 59 volunteers, but Reese would like to double that to hat least the 100, 120 range.

“If we can get into the 100, 120 range, have some real good dedicated volunteers, I think we’ll be in real good shape.”

If anybody wants to help and be part of the volunteer program, they are encouraged to call the nature center at 507-437-7519.