High Park Through the Seasons

Our trip to High Park on Friday was awesome!
We loved the subway ride (the front car is so entertaining!)

Our program was called "Tracks and Trails" . We learned to be detectives, looking for evidence of animals in the park.
We were taught to look for:

Scat
Animal Homes
Body Parts ( feathers, fur)
Tracks
Sounds
Food Clues

We practiced moving like animals:

We made our own tracks:

And scat:

And we matched some animal evidence to pictures of animals:

Then we went outside to be detectives,

where we found real tracks:

And food evidence:

One group found a beautiful red-tailed hawk feather, and we saw a rare red squirrel! We saw some animal homes ( burrows, nests, logs), but the only scat we saw was dog scat. We heard the sounds of many birds ( chickadees, cardinals, and woodpeckers), as well as some chattering squirrels.

We also stood on top on top of the snake hibernaculum ( we were told that hundreds of snakes might be below us, all tangled together for the winter:

That reminds me! Before we went outside, we had a visit from the Nature Center's resident snake, Snappy, who is a corn snake. Snappy is not a poisonous snake. She is a constrictor! We couldn't touch her, but we were very excited to watch her twist and turn and wrap herself around one of our instructor's arm.

It was a wonderful day. Although the weather was deceptively cold, the rain held off for us, and we had a great time. Thank you SO MUCH to our parent volunteers. B's Dad, R's Dad, G's Mom, and E's Mom. We could not have done it without you all.