Quick & Easy Habitat Education Activities 4-3 Wildlife ... · PDF fileanimals that might live...

Fourth Grade 45-60 Minutes

Outdoors

Quick & Easy Habitat Education Activities Wildlife Sign Walk

Designed by Heidi Bohan/ Starflower Foundation

Description: Students learn how to look for evidence of wildlife in a natural habitat area by studying images of different types of wildlife sign. They walk through the natural habitat, making field observations and looking for wildlife sign, then record wildlife sign through drawing and journaling.

Objectives: • Students learn to recognize wildlife sign. • Students understand that wildlife, even if they aren’t visible, live in habitat areas. • Students understand that the type and details of sign can indicate exact species.

Print Materials: • ‘How-to-do Activity: Wildlife Sign Basics’ • Images: ‘Wildlife Sign’ Kit Materials: • Foam core clipboards: 1 per student Teacher Supplied: • Student journals or paper: 1 per student • Optional: Wildlife tracking field guides

Washington State EALRs Science 1.1 Properties: Understand how characteristics are used to categorize life in living systems. 1.3.10 Identify the characteristics of organisms living in a given habitat and explain how those characteristics allow the organism to survive in that habitat. 1.1.6 Understand how to use characteristics to sort common organisms into plant and animal groups. Identify the characteristics of living organisms. Describe and sort living organisms using characteristics.

Science Kits: Ecosystems

Before activity: Go to natural habitat area and look for evidence of wildlife using ‘How-to-do Activity’ and ‘Wildlife Sign’ images to help locate evidence of wildlife. Record these sites as places to visit with students during this activity. It is more effective to do this before class which allows for enough time and concentration for locating a variety of wildlife sign in areas that you may not otherwise have time to explore. Especially look near water and along smaller side trails. Activity • Bring students to natural habitat area. Say, “In our Habitat Hunt activity we searched for some of the things wildlife need to survive. Review what they have learned about some of the things wildlife need in order to survive and the types of animals that might live in the habitat area. • Ask, “How do we know which wildlife actually live in this habitat area?” (see them, hear them.) • “What are other kinds of evidence of wildlife?” (poop or scat, tracks, nests, burrows, signs of feeding, etc.). “This evidence is called wildlife ‘sign’. Let’s look for some of these things.” • Show images: ‘Wildlife Sign’. Show any nearby examples in habitat while discussing:

Homes: Nests, holes, molehills, spider webs, cocoons, etc. Tracks: Look in wet or moist areas, especially near mud puddles, streams. Includes insect and bird tracks.

Snowfall, and sometimes frosty ground, is excellent. Feeding: Chew marks, piles of feathers or bones, empty snail shells, holes in trees, piles of seed pods. Trails: Look for ‘tunnels’ in thickets (size and shape can indicate animal using it), paths worn in meadows,

worn or scratched areas on trunks, logs, snags (hair and claw marks can indicate animal) Sighting and hearing: the least common, except for birds and squirrels. Some people are expert at

identifying birds by sound. Scat: an important way to identify wildlife in your habitat, especially of nocturnal or secretive animals.

• Walk through the habitat area and go to sites that were located prior to activity and point out a variety of wildlife sign. Be sure to point out commonplace sign such as bird song, mole holes, insect feeding sign and woodpecker holes, along with more interesting or difficult to discern sign, such as trails, bird or insect tracks in puddles, claw marks and hair on tree trunks, etc. • Encourage students to locate their own sign. Remind them to be alert for many types of sign. Share findings as they are discovered. Discuss the possible identification of the wildlife that made the sign and how students might learn more. • Student journals: Draw and label one (or more) wildlife sign in the habitat area. Labels should include a description of the sign, the habitat need it represents (food, water, shelter, space), and the animal the student thinks made or uses it. • Conclusion: “We can see evidence of wildlife in our habitat, even if we don’t get to actually see the wildlife”. Extension: Students create a display about one urban wildlife species, and its sign, that might use the habitat area for survival.

Vocabulary Wildlife sign: evidence indicating the presence or existence of wildlife, traces of a usually wild animal Scat: excrement, animal fecal dropping Tracking: to follow the tracks or traces of, to search by following evidence until found

4-3

©Starflower Foundation

Before conducting the Wildlife Sign Walk activity go to habitat area and look for wildlife sign. You are more likely to find sign when you can concentrate and explore alone, rather than with a large group. The following are tips and sug-gested areas to look for wildlife sign in Seattle urban areas. Refer to the images: ‘Wildlife Sign’ for this activity while reading the following. There are also many tracking books and online resources available for more information.

Times of Year for tracking Winter is the best time of year to see a wide variety of wildlife sign such as feeding sign, trails and abandoned nests. During winter, foliage, which otherwise obstructs sightings and access, is reduced in habitat areas. Fall and spring are excellent for sightings and to hear wildlife, observe nest building and food gathering behav-ior. In fall, animals are often in family groups while they feed and begin establishing winter homes. Summer can be a quiet time while wildlife secretly raise their young and thick vegetation covers many signs. Look for scat and feeding sign, and take care not to dis-turb nesting or den sites.

Places to find Claw Marks Snags and tall trees are favorite haunts of many animals. Look for rough or chipped bark patterns and then look closer for claw marks and hair. Hair can help identify the animal species. You may be surprised how often you will find this evidence of climbing wildlife. Low overhanging boughs provide an observation, feeding and sleeping area for animals. Look for disturbed bark and moss, worn areas and hair or feathers. Forest debris such as logs and branches along trails can show evidence of wildlife passing over or along them. Look for worn spots, claw marks and hair on edges and tops of overhanging branches and logs across the trail.

Tracking etiquette and laws Wildlife need to have areas that are safe for them!

Keep large groups of children and dogs out of thickets and other prime habitat. Wildlife are far more frightened of dogs and cats than humans, so keep pets at home. It is illegal to chase or harass native wildlife. Climbing trees to nests or digging up tunnels to locate wildlife dens is harmful to wildlife and usually illegal at local, state and federal levels. Never disturb nesting or den sites, especially if you have seen sign that indicates there are young present. Instead, protect them from intrusion (such as by creating woody debris barriers) and observe tracks and other sign to monitor growth of young. Take a photograph instead of an actual object; leave scat, nests, eggs, scratch marks and most feeding sign. However, feathers, hair, bones and some feeding sign are fun to collect to create tracking exhibits and use for iden-tification. Make track molds with plaster of Paris. Use good judgment and discuss ethics at all times.

Best Places to look for Tracks Mud puddles are great places to find tracks. Look in the water and around the edges. Edges of water such as ponds and streams provide prime opportunity to observe tracks of animals coming to water. Look for sandy beaches and exposed earth. Sandy areas such as beaches, sandbars, eroded hills, or artificially placed sand (as tracking stations) are excellent for observing tracks, even after rainfall. Wet or frosty grass can offer evidence of tracks, though not distinct. Look for patterns of depressed grass indicating walking or running. Meas-urements between tracks and track patterns can indicate the species. Snow is a rare treat in urban Seattle so make sure to take time to look, especially if it lasts for a few days. Snow holds tracks well, and is easily photographed.

Weather Rainfall creates soft ground and puddles that are excellent for finding tracks. It also washes away tracks and sign so go out two or three days after a good rainfall for best op-portunity to see tracks or other signs. Sunny and pleasant weather brings out wildlife, just as it does people. This is a good time to sit quietly and listen and observe wildlife. Snow and frost can be excellent for observing wildlife tracks. Go out in the morning before melting. Morning dew can show a record of tracks in meadows.

Scat (also called Poop) With large groups of children it is unlikely to have visual sightings of most animals. Therefore, scat is often the first sign you will see of wildlife in urban habitat areas. Scat contents, shape and size are indicators of the species of animals that left it. For example domestic dog scat is mealy, made up of primarily corn or rice grain while that of wild canines (fox, coyote) will be made up of hair or fruit seed. Location can also indicate species; foxes tend to leave scat at trail crossings, raccoons at the base of a tree, muskrats on rocks or logs, meadow voles in ‘latrines’ along tiny trails. Do not handle or collect scat without further research.

How-to-do ACTIVITY– Wildlife Sign walk Wildlife Sign Basics

Feeding sign Feeding sign is another indicator of the presence of wildlife, and is readily found in habitat areas. Look for chewed grass, stems and leaves, and piles of seed shells such as maple seed, fir cones and hazelnuts. The way in which vegetation is browsed can indicate species. A sharp angled browse sign can indicate rabbit, mountain beaver, vole or other rodent, while a shredded cut can indicate deer or elk feeding sign. Look closely and compare to other sign present to help discover species.

4-3a How-to-do Activity: Wildlife Sign W

alk

Signs of Wildlife

HOmes

Large twiggy nests high in trees are often homes of squirrels, crows, ravens and hawks.

Holes in trunks may be homes to woodpeckers, raccoons, flickers,

squirrels and many others.

Wasps, yellow-jackets and bees make paper-like nests that hang or are in the ground.

Some birds make nests in the ground (above, towhee), or that hang from

branches (left, bushtit), or in the boughs of trees (below, robin)

Webs and cocoons are homes for many species

of spiders, moths and butterflies.

Holes and burrows in the ground are homes to moles, snakes, frogs, salamanders, mountain beavers, minks, foxes and many other ani-mals. This is a mole hole.

4-3b Images: Wildlife Sign

Phot

o by

Hei

di B

ohan

Photo by Heidi Bohan

Photo by Heidi Bohan Photo by Heidi Bohan



Signs of Wildlife

Tracks (footprints)

Look for tracks in mud…

in sand...

and, best of all, in snow…






Signs of Wildlife

Feeding

Squirrels and small rodents leave signs of feeding on cones (above) and maple and ha-zelnuts seeds (below). Look on rocks, stumps and the base of trees for this sign.

Insects leave a variety of feed-ing sign such as holes in leaves, and tunnels burrowed into wood (left, bee-tle larvae).

This broken snail shell (above) is a sign of feeding by a raven, grouse or other large bird.

These leaves and stems have been browsed by animals such as deer, rabbits, or by insects.

Holes in trees are usually made by

woodpeckers. These square or

rectangular holes are made by

pileated wood-peckers while they look for

grubs and insects to eat.








Signs of Wildlife

Trails and Tunnels

Trails can often be clearly seen in habitat areas. Look closer and it may be possible to find rub marks and hair on overhanging branches or logs.

Rub mark

on branch

Some animals make trails up trees and snags. Look for shredded bark, claw marks and fur hair.

Look for trails and tunnels in grass. Fol-low these trails and

find tracks, scat, hair, and feeding sign.





Signs of Wildlife

Sightings

Birds can be seen high in the trees (above, pine siskin),

and along tree trunks while they are feeding

(right, Northern flicker).

Young deer fawns can some-times be seen in rural areas.

Look for families of squirrels in snags. Sockeye salmon can be seen in streams.

Ants make homes under woody debris, in stumps, and sometimes make anthills

of woody debris.

Pacific chorus frogs hide in foliage, chang-ing color to match their

surroundings.

Butterflies and bum-blebees are seen fly-ing and landing on foliage and flowers.










Signs of Wildlife

Scat (also called POOP)

Black bear scat filled with blackberries and plums.

Deer scat looks similar to rabbit scat. Both eat mostly grass and leaves.

A close look at the base of a large tree may reveal scat from raccoons and opossums who

make their home in large trees.

One of the best ways to discover the presence of wildlife that lives in your habitat area is to look for scat. The shape, size and material

in scat can help identify which animal left it. These are a few

examples of scat.





Scat filled with hair and bones indicates the presence of a wild carnivore. This short-tail weasel’s scat reveals the tiny jawbone of a

meadow vole, a recent meal.


Quick & Easy Habitat Education Activities 4-3 Wildlife ... · PDF fileanimals that might live...

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