Wild Ideas – Thoughts behind the Wild Lives classes, cameras and ecosystem

Owl Prowl

Back in February/March this year, I started talking with the library about running some kind of class with them. After sitting down and talking with them, though, I realized that the way we run classes in schools doesn’t work in libraries. In schools, kids are* in the same class, day after day, week after week, so you can run a sequential class that builds on previous classes. In a library, *especially* a kid’s library, people come and go as they please. The sequential class structure wouldn’t work. I had to fink about this for a sec, because all the teaching materials we’d been building were for sequential classes.

*well, at least in theory

That afternoon, by pure chance, I was hanging out with other parents at my daughter’s school during pickup. I mentioned to another dad that I’d seen a screech owl in a nest that day, and a kid overheard and was curious. Before long, five more curious kids popped up, so I offered to bring everyone over to have a look at the owl. Like a snowball, one kid told another told another, and eeeeveryone wanted to come see an owl. Soon, a convoy of cars followed us to the local cemetery for an impromptu owl viewing. I ran home to grab my camera and long lens as a way, and set it up so that kids could see the faraway animals on the camera screen without disturbing the owls. Another parent took this picture while we were in the middle of things.

The gears in my head started turning after that, and I pitched that we run a ~2-month class meeting with families once a week, after work. In honor of our first foray with children, we called it the Owl Prowl. The library didn’t have budget for this first class, so Jasmine and I found a group called the Gathering of Ocean Science Hardware that was offering $500 micro-grants for running science-y events, and we put an application together. Most applicants were using their funding for materials or space rental, but for us, we had space in the cemetery and the materials were all there in nature — we mostly just needed something to pay my teachers for running programs. In the stuff-oriented world of science, we were the weirdos here — I think we came in eigtheenth out of twenty applicants in the review process, but hey, we got the grant, and we got cracking!

The whole thing came together in a few days. We intentionally didn’t do any signup process — just told folks to come meet us at the cemetery gates at 5pm on Mondays, and we’d run a free, hour-long nature walk for kids. It was a series of nine walks, every Monday in April and May. Every week, we said, we’d focus on a different aspect of nature. We didn’t publish a schedule of what we’d do each week — we figured we’d plan it out as we go. It was enough to just say

free•nature•kids

We printed a bunch of fliers and put them around, gave them to all the libraries in town, and told everyone we knew. It seemed like it would work, but it was still a bit nerve-wracking to go out the first day without any idea if people would show up. As luck would have it, though, we got a pile of kids coming through on day 1.

Kids looking through owl pellets underneath a Great Horned Owl nest

Week after week, our small team would design an activity for that week’s Owl Prowl. We had a bunch of basic kid materials on hand — a bag full of dollar store markers, some paper, clipboards, and we could always make a run to the dollar store for simple additional supplies. The goal was just to engage kids with the natural world for an hour, and, as it turns out, you don’t need much stuff in order to do that. Mostly, you just need to find the interesting thing in nature and figure out how to make it interesting for a young child. If we ever needed stuff for a class, we could often just ask our community, and they were happy to bring it.

Our classes ended up going like this:

Week 1: Watching owl fledgelings and picking apart owl pellets

Week 2: Scientific illustration and drawing the natural world

Week 3: Turkaoke

Week 4: Knotweed bubble tea

Week 5: Painting and stamping with found materials

Week 6: 12 cent microscopy

Week 7: Pond animal collection

Week 8: Pond animal release

Week 9: Cyanotype printing with sunlight and found materials

These are a lot of different activities, and I want to go into some detail describing our work with four of them.

Scientific Illustration

I like this class because the only materials were paper and pencils. Jasmine led this class — she has a background in illustration, and she teaches scientific illustration to adults and children. This class was about drawing what you see — the basic skill in observation and illustration. She started with a line drawing exercise, and then had children pick a subject, get down the form, and then fill in the details and texture.

Knotweed Bubble Tea Straws

We went all-out for this class! Japanese Knotweed is an invasive plant that grows everywhere in our town. Last year, I noticed that it’s hollow, with nodes, similar to bamboo, and the diameter of a good-sized knotweed stalk is similar to a bubble tea straw. It’s also easy to cut with a knife, and I figured it would make good material for kids learning to use knives.

I didn’t have the budget to buy bubble tea, so I visited every bubble tea shop in town, asking them to sponsor us with 30 free teas. I got lukewarm responses from the first seven shops, but the eighth — Kimochi bubble tea — was run by two sisters, one of whom had a two year-old son who was into nature, and they had just set up shop and were looking to get the word out. They were up for sponsoring the project.

One parent had been bringing his daughter to our classes regularly, and had asked me if he could help volunteer with us. He happened to be a veteran of the Marines, and I asked if he had any knives (as it turned out, he had an extensive collection!). He and his wife brought a stack of knives, and we set up some knife stations where kids could use knives on their own, but in a safe way.

We had about sixty people show up for this event, including parents. We went down to a knotweed stand by the river, harvested stalks that were the right size, then each kid cut out a section of a stalk, cut a point in one end so that it would poke through the bubble tea lid, and trimmed the other end below the node in the stalk so they would get a hollow straw.

When everyone had made straws, I mentioned that there was a cooler full of bubble tea hidden in the woods. This was a surprise to everyone, but they found it in short order and everyone had a bubble tea!

Pond Collection and Exhibition

This idea was our most powerful program, and also one of the most complex ones to design and think about. We had more people learn about the Owl Prowls through this class and mini-exhibit than from any of our other marketing efforts. It was also a reminder that, in cities, there’s always a funny balance between bringing people to wildlife vs bringing wildlife to people.

There’s a small artificial pond in the cemetery. It has no inflow or outflow — it’s fed by runoff and a hose, and there is no way for water to get out. Still, it’s full of life — bullfrogs and tadpoles, fish, snails, insect larvae, herons, snakes and more. Every one of our activities involves looking at wildlife in situ, without capturing or disturbing the animal. Still, all of us also have the same shared childhood experience of catching animals in our backyard and keeping them in terrariums, learning about wildlife by bringing it into our homes. In fact, every naturalist we know has that same common activity as a child.

We decided to try our first activity taking animals from the wild and having children collect and make a week-long exhibit, in the library, about wildlife in our local pond. We asked a friend, Lea Fabre, from the RISD Nature Lab to come help children ID species that they found in the pond, and Lea was kind enough to bring along several field guides, as well as lend us a bunch of high-quality nets from the Nature Lab. We also went in ahead of time and set up an aquarium and an amphibian-friendly terrarium in the library, so the tanks were cycled and were set up to support life.

As you might expect, catching animals was a huge hit with children. It is tricky, with large numbers of kids, to keep an attitude of care and respect for the animals we’re collecting. Some of the children (as well as many of the parents) had never done this before, and while they were naturally curious about the animals they were finding, didn’t know how to draw the line between “I’m fascinated by this tadpole” and “I should stop touching the tadpole because I’m stressing it out”. Fortunately, we had lots of adults who work with wildlife around to help us out, and we were able, with a fair amount of effort, to keep children engaged and animals unharmed.

One of the ideas behind children making an exhibit for other children is based on a social theory I have. I think that, when a child discovers something interesting about the natural world, if we highlight that child’s story and discovery in the community, then other children will get intrigued and look for their own discoveries in the natural world. Along those lines, if a child and their parents gave their permission, I took photos of the children collecting the animals, and put their photos up on the wall in the library as “official pond collectors” of the pond wildlife exhibit.

This mini-exhibit stayed up for a week. After a week, at the next Owl Prowl, we returned the animals back to the pond (except for the invasive snails, which I moved to my fishtank at home). While planning the return activity, I couldn’t shake two images from my head:

While we were catching animals, this kid who kept going back to the bucket with minnows and trying to grab them, saying, “I have to help them breathe!” We dissuaded him (gently) from doing this maybe 5-10 times, but his parents, who were right next to us as we dissuaded him, kept overriding us and encouraging the kid. Grabbing fish (roughly and unnecessarily) from a bucket doesn’t sit feel right to me — it feels like that kid doesn’t have it in his head that these are live animals and need to be treated with care. He’s treating them more like stuffies. But it’s not really the kid that I have issue with — the kid is just a kid, he’s not expected to have a solid concept yet of how to catch and care for wild animals. What bothers me is the parents, who are in a position of power in this kid’s life, who are encouraging the wrong behavior. They’re not modeling it, but they are steering the kid in the wrong way. Jasmine saw it, too — we talked a lot about how we could structure the activity to avoid casually veering off in a careless direction like that.

The other was, when the animals were in the library, we had all these signs up saying, “Don’t tap the glass! It scares the animals.” Several times over the week, I saw a parent come in with a small child, go right up to the glass, and tap the glass. The librarians would say, “please don’t tap the glass”, the parent would nod, and then go right back to tapping.

This is the same trouble I have with zoos — when you have this power dynamic, an animal trapped in a cage, I feel like people are almost guaranteed to abuse that dynamic. Add that to a culture where we don’t empathize or connect well to wildlife, where we’re never taught what wildlife is or how to be around it, and you get this kind of casual abuse born out of fear, ignorance, curiosity and boredom.

That’s not to say that everybody acts this way — the stories I mention are a minority of the families we worked with, or who came to see our library exhibit. Most people were perfectly careful and respectful. Still, as someone who works all the time with young children, I’m very sensitive to the idea that young children are often copying what they see their parents do. When I see a parent modeling poor treatment of a wild animal to their child, it’s not hard to imagine that the child will grow up thinking that that’s the right way to treat a wild animal. We started talking about how we might structure this activity — the only activity where we set up a power dynamic between humans and wild animals — to get us connection to wildlife, rather than casual abuse.

I was talking over this issue with my neighbor, a conservation ecologist who has raised two children, and he suggested making a ritual around catching and release. Children, he said, respond well to ritual. That had the ring of truth to it, so I decided to make the release day follow a theme of thanking the animal, including writing a thank-you note to the animal that would go on display in the library.

This worked well, I think. We went down to the pond, released the animals one at a time, thanking them as we released them, and then the kids spent the rest of the time writing their own thank you notes, which we collected and put up on display.

If I were to do this again, I would start the catching with a ritual, something to hammer home the idea that these are live, wild animals that we are going to, more or less, kidnap and hold captive. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t do it, but that, if we’re going to do it, we should do it in the most careful and respectful way possible.

Jasmine found that this idea actually a common practice across many indigenous cultures, and it’s called The Honorable Harvest. That idea, for how to carefully and sustainably take animals from the wild, is one of these big things that we don’t learn about how to interact with the natural world.

The Honorable Harvest takes different forms, and is taught in different ways by many different cultures, but it goes more or less like this:

Ask permission of the ones whose lives you seek. Abide by the answer.

Never take the first. Never take the last.

Harvest in a way that minimizes harm.

Take only what you need and leave some for others.

Use everything that you take.

Take only that which is given to you.

Share it, as the Earth has shared with you.

Be grateful.

Reciprocate the gift.

Sustain the ones who sustain you, and the Earth will last forever.

Twelve Cent Microscopy

Since we were supported by the Gathering for Open Science Hardware, I guess I should talk about our most hardware-focused Owl Prowl. This was an activity that I call the twelve-cent microscope, where have children turn their parents’ cell phones into a capable microscope.

We do this using only three materials:

Bobby pins — $.01

Scotch tape — $.01

A 7mm plastic collimating lens — $.10

The collimating lens is the only unusual part here. I first learned this activity by getting cheap laser pointers from the dollar store and popping the collimating lens out of the laser pointer. That works great for one or two — if you need more, pick up some off ebay or aliexpress (link above at the lens). They cost $.10-$.12 per lens.

Building the microscope is super easy — you use the bobby pin to hold the lens, and then you tape the pin onto the back of a phone, so that the lens is directly over the camera’s lens. Looks like this:

This is powerful for many reasons. First of all, microscopes are amazing, but most kids have never seen a microscope. Conventional microscopes are also tricky for kids to use — lots of kids have trouble putting their eyes up to the eye cups on a microscope, as it feels distracting, and they spend their time thinking about how they feel instead of what they see.

Phone microscopes get away from that — suddenly, the image is right on front of you. The way you use the phone scope is also very different from using a conventional microscope: you don’t bring nature to it, you can bring it to nature. You don’t have to fiddle with a focus knob or stage adjustment, you just move the phone around and see if the image looks right. This freeform use of technology to let you see nature in a different way is the big philosophical concept at the center of a lot of our teaching, and I think it’s a very powerful concept.

Also, of course, the phone is a phone! Use it to record photos and videos. Pick out your favorites! Edit the videos together! Put in subtitles! Share your creations with your friends! Set up a micro-facetime call between your grandmother and an ant! All these things that phones are really good suddenly also apply to this new, unexplored world of tiny stuff in nature.

Finally, the child built this tool that they are using to explore the world. That’s powerful! If it breaks, they can fix it! If they want to adjust the zoom by changing the lens spacing, they can do that with a bit of cardboard! Building your own tools for exploration is a wonderful way to get into the spirit of exploration. This particular tool is great because it just takes five minutes to put together, and suddenly the phone works in a dramatically different way.

During the class, I got everyone set up with the building activity. For 5-10 minutes, everyone is working on getting the materials and putting it together onto a phone. Finally, people all got it working. I stood up, wondering if I needed to run an activity about looking at stuff…

and everyone was quiet. They were all quietly walking on hands and knees, each lost in their own world of exploration and discovery. For 20 minutes, everyone was totally self-directed and engaged. As a teacher, this is my favorite thing to see. It’s what learning — true learning — looks like.

I love this design, and I think it can serve as the foundation for a great number of activities around exploring small things with young people.

We ran our final Owl Prowl on May 29. In my view, this was an extremely successful program. We ran nine classes, completely free for the attendees, and we probably averaged ~50 people attending each class. We were able to highlight student work and discoveries to the greater community through the public space of the library. I thoroughly believe that libraries can serve as a place for young people to connect with the natural world, and this program helps us show libraries that it can work, without taking a ton of money or requiring extra effort from the staff librarians. If this program was a prototype, the next step is to make a batch — try it out in several different libraries and locations around the city, invite several different teachers to help run the program, and to continue to create and try out new ways to engage young people with the natural world.

–a

Day 1 Animals

As I teach more iterations of this class, I’m appreciating how different lessons of the class land. I like starting the class off by getting students outside as quickly as possible. We’ll meet up, have a short intro in a classroom, and then go outside to our study area, where students are supposed to come up with their own answer to the question, “what are the animals here going to do after we leave?” I don’t give much instruction about how to do that, just a quick chat about how to look for tracks and sign. Students work in small groups, each group comes up with their own way of answering that question, and then they set up a trail camera to see if their prediction is correct.

The next day we meet, I pull footage from the cameras before the class, and we go over it together. Most groups have some sort of problem with their camera. Maybe they didn’t turn it on, or they have lots of leaves right in front of the camera, with several hundred videos of leaves waving in the breeze (really common). There might be a camera failure that has nothing to do with the students, like an SD card failure or batteries running out. We also notice that a lot of groups didn’t point their camera at the thing they wanted to see. This is natural — on the first day, I just give them the basic “strap a camera to a tree” kit, which is actually remarkably hard to work with (we build tools for positioning and aiming cameras on day 2). All of these problems are learnable, workable problems — “oh, you had lots of leaves in front of your camera. Next time, put your camera somewhere with a clear view, or take out some of the leaves and branches.” “You wanted to look at the ground, but we’re mostly looking at the treetops. Next time, do a test shot after you set it up to see if you’re looking in the right direction”. Easy, fixable lessons. It’s fine that they had problems, and it’s actually better for them to learn from their own mistakes than for me to hover over them trying to correct everything they’re doing wrong.

And then, something cool happens — somebody gets a success. It might be intentional, or a lucky guess, or completely by accident, but someone finds an animal that is a surprise to everyone.

It’s a surprise, generally, because most of the wild mammals* we see are daytime foragers — in the US, these are animals like rabbits and squirrels. Most of the mammal activity that happens near people happens at night, when people are not there. That’s the magic of trail cameras — they can see what happens when we aren’t around, and for most students, this is a view of wild animals that they have never seen before.

In our class yesterday at Dreamspace, one group of students got the video above of a Small Indian Civet Cat. This is a pretty common animal throughout Southeast Asia, and they actually adapt pretty well to human settlement, living close to humans, and coming out at night to feed on rodents, insects, roots and fruit. Because they come out at night, people don’t often see them. The group who found this animal found it in a clever way — they noticed two broken bird’s eggs in a small space underneath a low bush. They looked in the bush and didn’t see a bird’s nest, so someone must have carried those eggs there. We looked a little closer and saw some well-worn tracks leading to that space and continuing through the nearby grasses. They set up a camera to watch that spot, and the civet visited three times that night, between 9pm and 1am.

The students didn’t know what animal to expect, but this was a very deliberate, clever find. They found the eggshells when they were walking around and realized that they were animal sign (sign is everything an animal leaves behind that’s not a footprint — bits of food, scat, claw marks, chewed up vegetation, etc). The rest was just observation and deduction, and it led them to the animal.

So far, every class I’ve taught has found an unexpected animal on day 1. The great thing about this is that it’s an eye-opener — there’s stuff out there that we don’t know about!. It’s also a reflection of how dense that unknown, unseen life really is. If you’re finding animals with no particular expertise, using new tools, and they’re showing up on the first day, there must be a lot of animal action going on around you that you don’t see. It’s great to celebrate that discovery as a class, and then use it as encouragement and inspiration for the next attempts — those students are just like you! If they found this, you can, too! What else can you find?

There are several moments in this class that are real eye-openers, and that are wonderful to watch. Day 1 Animals is one of my favorites, because it’s so easy and so unexpected, but also an indicator of this unseen world that’s going on all around us. Of course, it’s just the tip of the iceberg, and the rest of the class is all about poking around below the surface to see just how big this thing really is.

*this is specific to mammals. Reptiles, amphibians, birds, insects and other groups have their own patterns of activity. In this class, we most commonly get footage of mammals, although here in Sri Lanka, there is some pretty good reptile action.

Do Adults Fail Better Than Children?

Video by the Dreamspace Story Lab team

Today is day 2 of the adults class. Yesterday, I had my students go around their study area outside of Dreamspace, look at tracks and sign, and make a guess for where they thought an animal might visit in the night. They put up cameras looking at the site to check their guesses.

Most of them will come in today and find nothing on their cameras. It’s not their fault — they could have done everything right — they could have found the exact spot where an animal passed through the night before, but because of the weird new camera on its trail or the human scent lying around, the animal pass nearby, think that something is off about this run and choose another path. Or maybe it was just hanging out somewhere else entirely last night. We only had one night’s opportunity to get things right, and odds are that it won’t work out for many of the students.

I’m curious how that not-working-out is going to affect them. Failures happen for sure when you’re trying to predict wild animal behavior, but there’s nothing like an early success when you’re trying something new and hard. I’m very curious to see how the students respond to failure today, and how to they’ll get past the initial frustration. Adults and children also handle failure in different ways — no matter how you slice it, failure is a constant partner to learning. Failure hits some learners harder than others, particularly people who feel competitive or like they must always get the right answer. Both adults and kids have those tendencies, but kids generally have a built-in tolerance of failure, which helps them learn despite inconsistent instruction, difficult learning environments, and just regular old difficult material. I’m curious how each class will get past their initial failures.

There are some ways I can mitigate failures in the way I set up the class, which I should probably formalize as I start trying out more failure-prone variants of the class like the accelerated, 6-day version. Off the top of my head, the best thing I can probably do is to frame the class as a collaborative activity rather than a competitive one, where any group’s videos are fair game for the whole class to work with, rather than requiring that each group find their own story. That way, a success in anyone’s group is a success for the whole class, and helps cushion out any one group’s bad luck.

Another fascinating day in the classroom!

Speeding Up The Class

Tomorrow, I start teaching my first of two 6-day classes in Sri Lanka. Normally, I’ve been teaching these classes as 6-week-long classes, meeting once a week for an hour. As I work to bring the class into other schools, I frequently get asked if I can run a shorter course. School tends to be a very rigid, heavily scheduled affair, and the longer a course is, the harder is to wrangle into a heavily laden calendar. Personally, I don’t think this should be all that hard — science class already meets regularly in most grades everywhere in the world, and I feel like Wild Lives is conceptually right at the border of a natural history section of a science curriculum. The only difference is that students are figuring things out for themselves about their local ecosystem, rather than taking someone else’s word for it. Of course, it doesn’t really matter what I think — schools hear you say something like “a 6-week curriculum” and they get fidgety, but if you say, “a 1-week class”, then that sounds limited and doable. It’s just human nature to be skeptical of new things and to take small bites at first. Whaddayagonna do?

The study area for tomorrow’s class, right outside dreamspace

At any rate, this conference I’m at in Sri Lanka, Dinacon, only goes on for a month, so whatever the case, I had to shrink down my luxurious 6-week timeline into something that would fit in a short time. I decided to try to get it all into one week. The tricky thing, of course, is that Wild Lives is all about finding and exploring wild animals, and wild animals don’t know about class schedules. The great thing about having a week between classes is that it’s very tolerant of failures. Some nights, animals don’t show up, other nights they do. Sometimes, you see the same individual animal every day as it passes by, other times you just get one glimpse of a charismatic animal over the whole 6-week period. It’s a game of probabilities — each animal in your area has a certain chance of walking in front of your camera every day. You can up your probabilities by putting your camera in a place that animals are more likely to go, but it’s never a sure bet, especially if you’re not putting out food to attract animals, which I never do. You can think of the number of animals you get to see as following a simple formula: animal sightings during a class = number of animals in each area * probability each animal walks in front of the camera in a given day * number of days * number of cameras. I guess you’re actually summing individual probabilities for each individual animal, but I said this formula was simple, so I’m just going to move on and you can just take my point, or grab a pencil and come up with your own elaborate formula if you’re so inclined.

I don’t have a lot of variables under my control. I’m in Sri Lanka, which has lots of biodiversity, but I’m also working at a school in a city, so I don’t really know how many animals are out there. We can play with ways to increase our probability of seeing animals — tracking them and putting cameras on their runs, setting cameras to super duper high sensitivity, using things that might attract animals, but the easiest thing is to just increase the number of cameras. Usually I do 3-4 cameras per class, but I brought enough cameras to do 6-7 per class, so I that’s an easy way to boost my odds.

I also asked for a little more time for each class — an hour and a half instead of an hour. We have the luxury of working in an empty lot and a pasture right next to Dreamspace’s building, so it doesn’t take much classtime to get out to the study area. I’m also working with older, more capable students — one class is adults 18-25, and another is high school students 13-18. They’ll have more endurance and (maybe) more focus than my younger students. This lets me spend more time with them outside, understanding tracks and the environment, and I can ask them to be more discerning about where and how they place their cameras (with elementary school students, I’m pretty happy when they get the camera on a tree and pointed somewhere an animal might pass).

The rest of the class structure doesn’t change much. Same number of days, same material to cover. The real question, and what determines the success of this class, is how successful they’ll be at finding animals. All my instincts tell me that there are plenty of animals out here, and it’s just up to us to find them. We’ll revisit this prediction a week from today. For now, I’ve got a class to teach!

Scouting

I’ll tell you the way I really want to teach my classes. I want to go in cold into a class, to walk into a school I’ve never been to before, put up cameras with students on day 1, and be confident that we’re going to find animals. In practice, it’s always worked out exactly like that, but every time, some part of me still doubts that it’s going to work out.

So I do what every unprepared student does before a test — a couple days before my test, I cram. In the case of this class, I obsessively scout out the school to get an idea what’s out there before starting the class. Like skimming the textbook a day before teaching it, I want to have some understanding of what we’re going to see before we see it as a group. Intellectually, I know that wild animals are everywhere, even in the middle of dense human settlements, but I always want to see it for myself before taking a look with students. So I go out, and with the help of Lumen and some other friends, take a close look at what’s happening in the bit of land behind the school.

Lumen setting up a camera trap in Batticaloa

At the moment, I’m in Sri Lanka, in an Eastern coastal town called Batticaloa, and I’ll be running at least two classes over the next couple weeks. Batticaloa is a sizeable city of a couple hundred thousand people, made up of island, lagoons and peninsulas where several rivers feed into the sea. I’m working at Dreamspace, a wonderful local community organization in town. They have a building with about an acre of half-cleared land where I’ll run the classes.

I spent about four hours today at the site, walking around, tracking, talking to folks who work there and the neighbors, and putting up a few cameras to see who shows up. This is my first time in Sri Lanka, so I’m mostly tracking species that I’ve never seen before. Some of them are familiar — house cats, lots of stray dogs, mice, and others are less so — mongoose, civet cats, gerbils. My first attempt at tracking gets broad strokes — “a turtle walked through here last night, there was a ~1.5’ long snake heading this way, here’s a run of a cat-sized animal that’s not a cat, passing low to the ground through grass and underbrush”. I sketch the tracks I don’t know, come back, puzzle through a field guide, and make my guesses. I photograph and poke at lots of poop, bones, and animal bits that are lying around. Poop tells you more about who’s walking around and what they’ve eating. I put up several cameras along the trails to see who’s making them, and to see if any of my guesses are correct.

Scouting the area isn’t just cramming for a test, though. This first scouting helps me stay informed and makes the class better all-around, but it’s also the time when I get to explore and figure things out for myself. The rest of the class will be helping other people understand animals, but this first part is when I get to learn. I get to check the first traps in the morning, and I’m looking forward to learning about our nighttime visitors.

Mouse Guest

A couple years ago, I had a mouse in my lab. I never saw it, but it wrought havoc on my potted plants. I only got to know my mouse by the evidence it left– holes dug through the pots, dirt scattered over the floor, small poops against the moulding.

My first reaction was one of annoyance. The mouse made itself right at home in a pot of dragonfruit cactus that I had grown from a tiny cutting. The mouse was digging tunnels through the pot, making a mess and killing the vines. I wanted it gone, so I went to the hardware store, picked up a hav-a-hart trap, baited it with peanut butter and left it on the floor near the pots.

It didn’t work. I went through a litany of traps and baits, consulted YouTube for help, and tried out some of my own designs. Each morning I came in to find the bait expertly nicked from the trap with the trap unsprung. This mouse was getting the better of me.

My curiosity started to get the better of me — what was this mouse up to? It wasn’t food–I didn’t leave any food around the lab. Sure, it would grudgingly eat the bits of cheese and peanut butter that I used to bait my traps, but it had started coming before there was any food around. As far as I could tell, this animal had just decided, for reasons of its own, that my pot was a nice place to spend time digging.

It slowly dawned on me that I wasn’t going to outsmart or capture this rodent, but I still wanted to know what it was up to. I had an old webcam and laptop lying around, and I set it up to watch where the mouse had been digging in the pot. I found some free software that would record a video whenever it saw a change in the webcam, and would save the resulting video to my computer. I was about to leave for a week-long trip, so I set it up to save videos to a Dropbox folder, so I could see them while I was away. I left the lab that night, hopeful that my labors would give me my first glimpse of my nighttime visitor.

I was on an early morning train out of town when I got my first hit. My computer pinged a notification, and a minute later, a video appeared on my drive. A fuzzy visitor, whiskered and skittish, popped into focus in my pot, hopping out of its hole to the rim of the pot, investigating the new shining camera in its home, then returning back to its industrious digging and searching. As the miles ticked away between us, my little contraption kept our connection going, pinging every so often to announce another glimpse into this life, parallel to my own, connected only by a flowerpot and a camera. Over the next several days, I captured hundreds of videos of the mouse, and was able to edit them together into this super-cut.

This happened years ago, but this funny connection really stuck in my head. The mix of roles in this activity — part investigator, part inventor, part observer/storyteller — proved to be something greater than the sum of the parts. For me, realizing that I could make my own tools to answer my own questions about a wild animal was equal parts power and fascination. Being able to make that connection in real-time–having an direct glimpse into the headquarters of local mouse activity–was just icing on the cake. I wasn’t sure what to call this activity, but I was knew that it was a thing.

This post marks the beginning of a three-week deep dive into making and using my own camera traps to study nature. I’m particularly interested in what makes this tool powerful and what sort of practices on the human side let me push this wildlife investigation activity the farthest. I have in my mind that wildlife investigation shouldn’t be the exclusive domain of scientists and hunters, and I’m thinking particularly about how to distill the essence of this activity and present it in such a way that people with no expertise in wildlife can get a brilliant, powerful window into the natural stories taking place right outside their door.

I plan on posting daily during this period, with updates, thoughts, and footage from my own investigations, and notes on how I’m adapting this wildlife investigation activity into a classroom activity. Stay tuned — there’s lots more to come!