Finding Fauna

Dolly's friends Jeff (in white hat) and Terry (in light blue t-shirt) are scientists who do research on wildlife in northern Wisconsin. They have devised a system to track the amount of mercury in lakes by catching loon chicks and measuring the amount of mercury in their blood. They have also tracked the coyote population year after year, and much, much more. They came to CEC (the local name for the school- Centro de Educacion Creativa- the Center for Creative Education; the school is also known by locals as "The Miracle on the Hill") to teach the kids some techniques for finding, identifying, marking, and estimating numbers of, the fauna on their campus. They set up simple traps and visited them a day later with the kids. They gave the kids data sheets to show them what data to collect (date, time, weather particulars, location of the research site, fauna identified, etc.) and had them enter the data as a group. It was amazing how much the percentage of cloud cover changed from one site to the next after just a few minutes of walking between sites.

At this site, Jeff and Terry put a long, metal panel into the ground with buckets buried at either end of it. The idea is that a snake or frog or whatever would be going along, hit the metal panel, slither along it, fall into the bucket, and not be able to get out. The kids would check the buckets every day and record what they found in them. On this first day, they found lots of insects and two shrews. The picture above shows Terry looking in the wildlife guidebook to find the name of the exact shrew for the kids to record. Behind her, from left to right, are the high school science teacher, Anna, her intern Kathryn, and Kaz.

At this station, Jeff and Terry set up a post in the middle of a circle of well-groomed, fine dirt. Jeff poured the oil from a can of anchovies onto the post to attract animals in the area, then came back with the kids to see if they could find animal footprints in the dirt. There were prints, but the soil wasn't fine enough to get a good print, so they could not be identified. Jeff says if you make the soil pretty wet, you can also get good footprints in the mud.

Oh, by the way, Jeff and Terry also told the kids that if they were not going to check the traps the next day (weekends, etc.), they should put a plank of wood in the buckets so the animals that fall in can crawl out. They do not want anything to die as a result of the research.