Wilsonville science teacher pens children’s book with former WHS students
Published 12:22 pm Monday, September 29, 2025
Retired Wilsonville High School science teacher Jay Schauer can remember how his love for animals began.
“In my kindergarten class, when I was a little kid in California, we did tide pools, and we went out and saw the tide pool critters and knew them and our parents were like, ‘Whoa, you know, all these things.’ And we were able to go out and see the monarch butterflies. We definitely had a dinosaur unit and at the same time, I had an older brother who was catching snakes and frogs and things, and so we had little critters in our house,” said Schauer.
That childhood enthusiasm for animals is something that Schauer hopes to spread with his new children’s book, “The Birds That Wish They Were Fish,” which was illustrated by 12 of his former Wilsonville High School students. The illustrated natural history kid’s book travels north to south down the Americas to explore the vast array of seabirds. The rhymes provide information about each animal, while deeper explorations at the bottom of each page provide more facts for curious readers.
“It’s been in the works for over 20 years,” said Schauer. “The seed was planted, (by) reading books to my own kids… and so this book actually just started as the title, ‘The Birds That Wish That They Were Fish.’”
The Birds That Wish They Were Fish at Backyard Bird Store. (Courtesy Photo: Jay Schauer)
Schauer joined the district in 1992 as a science teacher at West Linn High School, then moved over to the newly opened Wilsonville High School in 1995. He was one of the “original Wildcats” and eventually took the role of teacher mentor for middle and high school teachers in the West Linn-Wilsonville School District.
At WHS, Schauer taught classes like biology, marine biology, oceanography and statistics.
“My marine bio students did these little research posters on marine mammals or sea birds,” said Schauer. “That’s where I saw just an incredible collection of really talented artists coming through.”
Schauer’s wife, Amy, also taught in the district as the director of CREST (Center for Research in Environmental Sciences & Technologies). The pair met in graduate school at the University of Alaska, where he was working on a thesis focused on sea birds.
“Birds are flying all around you or calling all around you. All I gotta do is take a look,” said Schauer.
Writing a children’s book was a new challenge for the retired educator. Putting all of the rhymes and information together, as well as coordinating the different artwork, was a “very fun puzzle,” according to Schauer.
“It was sometimes a frustrating puzzle because I would exclude things that I really wanted,” he said. “I wanted it to be something you could read to a little one or that a younger one could read themselves. But there’s so much more that I was very intentional about. There’s going to be a page with a bird feeding underwater, because that’s why they wish they were fish and as you’ll see, they’re not all sea birds. It’s everything from penguins, the ultimate sea bird, to dippers, which are cruising around mountain streams.”
The students – Ella Rice, Ami Maki, Carrie Knapp, Gunta Klavina, Jacob Haqq, Madeline Ford, Lindsey Cline, Makayla Bruce, Portia Woods, Michelle Warner, Emma Steffen and Jessica Sessler – spanned years of teaching and came from around the world to Wilsonville High.
“There are so many different ways that the students ended up being part of this project. There’s a lot of serendipity in the book,” he said.
The illustrations in the book are from a variety of mediums including pastels, acrylic paint, colored pencils and digital illustration. A longtime fan of field guides, Schauer wanted the artwork to feel human-made.
The book is now available on sale at Backyard Birds locations as well as the Bird Alliance of Oregon, The Grove Lake Oswego, Grass Roots Books and Music in Corvallis, Bold Coffee and Books in Portland, Crane’s Nest Nature Store in Burns, Friends of Tryon Creek in Lake Oswego and Frog Pond Llamas in Wilsonville. For more information visit his website.
“One of the comments from one of the collaborators, also a teacher, said, ‘I think it’s just so cool that this is like the embodiment of lifelong learning,’” Schauer said. “I learned this past year how to be a children’s book author and coordinator.”