Powerpoint & script for winter Nature Studies
Demonstrating a hopping gait, to the amusement of Dick Rice and friends. Today, we have students do this on roll-out canvases with symbols for placement of front vs hind feet. Before we got that idea, Scott made cardboard cutouts and placed em on the floor. They got knocked around quite a bit by squirrel-imitators. Photo by David Job. (BTW, I don’t think squirrels’ tongues hang out like that.)
Discovery’s winter unit on tracking and sign interpretation (largely on mammals but also birds, other vertebrates . . .and, philosophically speaking, everything) was probably our most innovative Nature Studies unit. Before it was ever taken into elementary classrooms or teacher workshops—-in fact, before Discovery existed—Scott Brylinski, Cathy Pohl and I developed this as a class for Southeast outdoorspeople. Scott even went off to attend trainings by a famous tracking guru (returning somewhat underimpressed).
Paired with our tracks-&-sign classes were more academic classes on mammal taxonomy and evolutionary history. These were considerably less outdoorsy than most Discovery fare. But as we taught tracking to children and adults, we quickly realized that few knew the difference between a marten and a marmot, much less between their families the Mustelidae and Sciuridae. Without that conceptual grounding, it’s pretty hard to remember the actually-quite-predicable difference between marten’s slinky lope and marmot’s squirrel-like hop.
It should be noted that one aspect of our indoor mammal studies is delightfully hands-on. Discovery has an extensive collection of skulls and other bones. These make wonderful puzzlers. (Try to keep boys from chasing their friends around the classroom with that gaping wolverine skull; kinda disrespectful to old nóoskw.) As with tracks in the field, we encourage students not to jump right to species ID but to slowly assemble all the clues and contextual observations. For a skull, this begins with understanding dentition, and difference between canines, molars and incisors.
Everything is a track!
It didn’t take long for Steve Merli and me to start invoking critter-tracking principles and philosophies in all of our other nature-themes and activities. Moraines are tracks of glaciers. Migration is the track of a bird’s evolutionary past, tweaked, perhaps, by an ice age or two. Along with ‘save your face, keep your space,’ (devils-club advice repurposable for the time of covid!), ‘don’t ask who am I; ask where is here,’ and ‘why do we live here?‘ the simple reminder ‘everything is a track‘ has kept Discovery naturalists and students on their toes for more than 30 years.
● a 16 MB powerpoint with embedded presenters’ notes 
● a script for the above, with slide thumbnails, titled footprints & gaits of Juneau-area mammals 1 MB pdf 
