This week challenge was to focus on winter mammals. During the winter many mammals become elusive. We are fortunate to live near a National Wildlife Refuge which provides an excellent locale for our weekly adventures. Today we were able to hike a trail and drive through the preserve on a "mammal hunt". The children were very excited to discover multiple sets of deer tracks. Our area is heavily populated with white-tailed deer and this particular refuge is also home to an introduced Asian species the sika deer. Based on the size of our tracks we were able to identified them as white tailed deer. In addition to these tracks we spotted squirrels, and the scat of wild horses. We also found these tracks but were unable to identify them due to their degradation.
We plan on continuing our mammals study throughout the spring in hopes of discovering more animals.
3 comments:
I love that you have a place you can go on a "mammal hunt"! I think for children seeing footprints and then learning to identify them is such a great activity...one that they can learn a little bit about each time they see some tracks.
Great photos of your tracks too...they are hard to capture.
Thanks for sharing your link.
Could you submit this entry to the OHC Blog Carnival too? Thanks again.
http://blogcarnival.com/bc/cprof_9182.html
How neat that you live so close to such a great wildlife refuge! Thanks for sharing your study. :)
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