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.