July 2022 – Wild Ideas

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.