Education

April 26, 2021 by wpengine

Go For a Color Walk

by Jenise Brown

City Nature Challenge (April 29-May 2, 2022) is coming soon! Going for a “color walk” is one fun and easy way to participate no matter where you live.

What is a color walk you might ask? Each time you go for a walk, pick a single color—maybe green, white, red, pink, yellow. As you are out, keep your color in mind and look for it in the wild, noting plants, animals, and fungi that you see. When you find one (or evidence of one that you can’t see!), take a picture, and upload it to iNaturalist.

You’ll start to notice patterns among things you see in the color you’ve chosen, and you can make some hypotheses about the observations for each color, like what species you are likely to see in certain areas. Lots of plants are green, so a green color walk might help us to notice all of the plants that are around us, even in places like cracks in the sidewalk. Because the City Nature Challenge occurs during a season when Pittsburgh still experiences cold weather, this is probably the easiest color to find. In fact plants were the most common observations in Pittsburgh during the City Nature Challenge in 2020, with 9 of the top 10 observations being plants.

various green plants growing from a sidewalk crack — *Look at the variety of green plants in this sidewalk crack!*

green plants growing on rock — *Don’t forget to look for small patches of green in unexpected places.*

Yellow and purple are common colors in early spring flowers and might potentially switch your focus to exclusively flowering plants or even insects. City Nature Challenge tallies both the number of observations made and the species observed. Choosing one of these colors may help you to notice new and different species that you previously overlooked.

two yellow dandelions — *This dandelion flower is one of the earliest yellows of the season.*

two violets among leaves and sticks — *Don’t miss violets! They have both both broad green leaves and small purple flowers.*

Don’t forget about the less flashy, but still abundant fungi. Orange, white, or even brown might help you to notice them growing on trees, dead wood, soil, and rocks. An added element to help find more fungi is to look for and pick up fallen branches and inspect stumps. You can read more about urban fungi observations in this NY Times article.

There’s no need to leave the city or even go to a park to have a great color walk! You can plan a route near where you live and repeat it multiple times, picking a different color each time. You might be surprised by all of the things you never noticed before right in your own neighborhood!

Jenise Brown is a Museum Educator with Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Museum staff, volunteers, and interns are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.

Evidence Counts for Absent Creatures – City Nature Challenge

by Patrick McShea

Participation in the upcoming City Nature Challenge (April 30 – May 3) can range from using your phone’s camera to document a couple front yard observations, to compiling hours’ worth of observations at multiple sites during all four days of the event. Additional information about the six-county Pittsburgh Region’s efforts in this international project can be found elsewhere on the museum’s website:

City Nature Challenge (how to participate and resources)

Teaching About Local Wildlife with the City Nature Challenge

If you have a little more time available, however, a deeper working knowledge of the City Nature Challenge’s scope, limits, and purpose can be obtained by reviewing the answers the project’s organizers provide to more than a dozen frequently asked questions. One very important aspect of the project addressed in the FAQs page is the broad range of observations that can be collected, interpreted, and compiled via iNaturalist, the innovative phone app that serves as the digital engine for the City Nature Challenge (CNC).

Mud Evidence

In answer to the question, What kinds of observations should I make during the CNC? organizers suggest exactly the range of noticeable phenomena that any naturalist leading an interpretive walk would stop to point out: Any observations of WILD plants, animals, fungi, seaweed, bacteria, lichen, etc. you find in and around your city! Observations of living or dead organisms, or evidence of those organisms, like shells, tracks, scat, feathers, etc., are fine. A photo of raccoon tracks in a muddy creek edge, for example, could count in a CNC tally as evidence of the mammal’s recent passage.

Another type of mud evidence indicates the presence of crayfish. In wet ground adjacent to ponds and streams, burrowing crayfish create distinctive and often fully-cylindrical mud structures above the holes they dig to reach groundwater. A photo of one of these “chimneys” documents the presence of the crustacean excavator somewhere below, but because there are multiple crayfish species in our region, further investigation would be necessary to refine such an observation to the species level.

Plants as Animal Evidence

Sometimes plants can serve as animal evidence. Beavers, for example, aren’t known for appearing in cell phone camera range very often, but their activity, in the form of gnawed tree trunks and branches is easy to document along local waterways, including all three of Pittsburgh’s rivers. When photos of beaver evidence include sufficient detail to identify the impacted tree or shrub, the document becomes a “two-for-one.”

On higher and drier ground, amid stands of goldenrod, the deformed stalks of some plants provide evidence of a specific insect. The globular swellings, which are known as galls, are produced by the plant in reaction to the secretions of a tiny parasitic fly. Females of the goldenrod gall fly, a species know to science as Eurosta solidaginis, lay eggs at the base of goldenrod flower buds. Larvae hatched from these eggs chew into the plant stem where their secretions ultimately result in the creation of a protective winter shelter. The distinctive galls are not fully secure, however. Females of the parasitoid wasp known as Eurytoma gigantea seek out galls and their fly larvae occupants as a food source for their own larvae. Downy Woodpeckers and Black-capped Chickadees are also known to peck into galls to eat the occupants. Most of the galls in the above illustration bear evidence of such bird beak chiseling.

Patrick McShea works in the Education and Visitor Experience department of Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.

Teaching About Local Wildlife with the City Nature Challenge

by Patrick McShea

Join the Challenge April 25-28, 2025

The sixth-grade student took the time to study a taxidermy mount from multiple angles before she approached with a question. “Is that Raticate?” she asked, pointing back at the lifelike preserved muskrat that had drawn her across the school cafeteria to the table promoting museum resources.

Raticate, she explained to my quizzical look, is a Pokémon creature. When she held up her phone, I conceded a striking resemblance between the cartoon-like beast filling the small screen and the sleek-furred stuffed rodent a few feet away. I then explained how the preserved muskrat represents a very real and relatively common mammal, one that in some seasons might be observable in the cattail-edged margins of Schenley Park’s Panther Hollow Lake, a location within a mile of where we stood.

The event, 14 months ago, was an evening meeting of a parent’s council at Pittsburgh Science and Technology Academy. Although I spoke with dozens of parents during my two-hour visit, the information exchange with the student remains a clear memory because it reinforced a research paper I read days earlier.

A study published in 2002 found primary school students in the United Kingdom knew far more about Pokémon creatures than they knew about local wildlife. (Why conservationists should heed Pokémon. Balmford A, Clegg L, Coulson T, Taylor, Science 29 Mar 2002) If the study’s findings remain valid nearly twenty years later, museum strategies to counter them have become more innovative, collaborative, and purposeful. The primary example of these ongoing efforts is an upcoming event known as the City Nature Challenge.

What is the City Nature Challenge?

The City Nature Challenge (CNC), coming up April 25–28, 2025, is an international effort for people to document plants and wildlife in metropolitan areas across the globe. (The Pittsburgh Region’s six county territory for the CNC includes Allegheny, Armstrong, Beaver, Butler, Westmoreland, and Washington Counties.) The event is a bioblitz-style competition with cities competing on several measurable fronts, including the number of participants, the sum total of recorded observations, and the total number of identified species. The technology enabling broad participation and accurate data compilation in this vast observational effort is the free app, iNaturalist, utilized through the same common device by which I first glimpsed Raticate, a smartphone.

iNaturalist and City Nature Challenge History

iNaturalist, originally developed as the Master’s Final Project of Nathan Agrin, Jessica Kline, and Ken-ichi Ueda at University of California at Berkeley’s School of information, is now a joint initiative of the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society. As the initiative’s website explains, “iNaturalist is an online social network of people sharing biodiversity information to help each other learn about nature.”

The City Nature Challenge also has California roots, beginning in 2016 as a Los Angeles versus San Francisco contest by citizen science staff at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and California Academy of Sciences. These two institutions continue to as the principal organizers for the global effort, and in 2021, more than 400 cities across the globe are expected to participate in the competition.

2021 marked the fourth consecutive year for Carnegie Museum of Natural History to serve as one of CNC’s city organizer agencies. Partner organizers for 2021 were the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy and the Pennsylvania Alliance of Environmental Educators. An online workshop for teachers and other educators to promote student participation in early March helped groups get an early start and a regularly updated web page contains current information about the event.

How to Participate in City Nature Challenge

If spending some time later this spring documenting the plants, animals, and fungi sounds interesting, please visit our City Nature Challenge page to learn how you can participate with the museum in the Pittsburgh region. We offer resources for educators, groups, and individuals interested in the annual bioblitz.

After the April 25–28 documentation phase, comes a vital second phase to the CNC that you might be able to support: identification of the photographed species. The identifications will be crowd-sourced through the online community April 29–May 1 still using the iNaturalist app.

Ocean Lessons

by Patrick McShea

During the late winter, students and faculty at Carnegie Mellon University’s Children’s School learned about the ocean all day, every day. A five-week study of a broad topic is an annual tradition at the school, which serves pre-school and kindergarten-aged children, and operates within the university’s Psychology Department to support developmental research and the training of educators.

Coordination of the ocean lesson plan was the responsibility of Donna Perovich, a kindergarten teacher at the Children’s School for the past 24 years who has worked as an overall support educator since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic. I learned of her efforts during the project’s planning stages when she asked to borrow ocean-related materials from the museum’s Educator Loan Collection.

Materials for Ocean Lessons from the Educator Loan Collection

The museum’s longest running outreach program is operating with a significant borrowing limitations during the pandemic: materials that cannot be cleaned, or would be damaged by repeated cleaning, are not currently available for loan. In Donna’s case the restriction meant she was able to borrow encased taxidermy mounts of several saltwater fish, plastic scale models of six different whale species, and a sea turtle shell, but not touchable examples of sea stars, sponges, sea fans, and delicate corals.

“I have a lot of seashells.” Donna explains, “Over the years I’ve been blessed with boxes of them. So, we had plenty of material for the students to touch and closely examine.” Among the museum materials she found particularly useful were the whale models. “We did a big whale measuring activity, measuring and pacing-off the lengths of different whales in the halls. Everyone developed a good sense of the size difference between species like a great blue whale and a pilot whale.”

Classroom Aquariums

Setting up and maintaining aquariums in the school’s four classrooms was among Donna’s early Ocean project tasks. The tanks featured freshwater species, two classrooms had single Betta fish, and the other two classrooms had larger tanks with mollies, tetras, and barbs. Observations of the live fish were vitally important for learning more about the movements and behavior of ocean fish. In the case of several three-year-olds, such observations also influenced their initial expectations of fish taxidermy mounts from the museum. “The aquariums had been in the classrooms for awhile before the museum materials appeared,” explains Donna, “and some of the youngest students thought the loan boxes with the fish were another aquarium.”

*The Ocean Mural at CMU Children’s School.*

Lest you think the confusion diminishes Donna’s respect for the thinking power of the children she works with, she brings up the enormous three-dimensional mural the students created to convey much of what they learned. “We had wonderful conversations where the children would be talking about things like deep ocean trenches and how reduced sunlight impacted the creatures living there. In some ways I think their brains are better able to absorb new information than our cluttered brains.”

*Anglerfish by Children’s School student.*

Whole school study units at the Children’s School conclude with a family festival. Although the school has operated in-person with reduced capacity this year, the Ocean Family Festival was a Zoom event. The camera feeds of several event sessions focused on child-created details in the amazing mural.

Teacher Profile: Emmanuelle Wambach

woman standing in front of a window wearing a face mask and a tie-dye t-shirt that says be kind

At the Jewish Community Center of Greater Pittsburgh (JCC), the youngest students direct much of their own learning. “We focus on the philosophy of the of the Reggio Emilia Approach,” explains Emmanuelle Wambach, referencing the innovative childhood learning model named for the northern Italian town where it was developed more than 60 years ago. Emmanuelle, who has worked at the JCC since 2018, currently teaches a dozen pre-school students at the Squirrel Hill facility. Back in November, when this group of three- and four-year-olds became interested in birds and bird eggs, she was determined to assist their exploration of the topic.

Through the museum’s Educator Loan Collection, she was able to borrow an encased taxidermy mount of an American Robin posed next to its nest and eggs, along with sturdy replicas of Bald Eagle, Golden Eagle, and Peregrine Falcon eggs. “There were some early discussions about the robin not being alive,” Emmanuelle recalls, “but we were able to make wonderful comparisons between the Peregrine Falcon and eagle eggs, and of course to the chicken eggs they were already familiar with.” The museum objects and the resulting discussions eventually led to group explorations of other resources such as the Audubon Society of Western Pennsylvania’s live camera feed documenting activity in and around the Bald Eagle nest in the Hays neighborhood of Pittsburgh.

taxidermy mount of a robin with nest and eggs

This example of an educator connecting with a helpful resource was far from a direct link, however, and actually hinged on artistic accomplishment. Emmanuelle holds a Master of Fine Arts from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and in sharing her talents with ceramics she has taught classes at several Pittsburgh area locations. She learned about the museum loan program when she was teaching ceramics at an afterschool program and met a fellow artist who had borrowed taxidermy mounts for students to use as drawing models.

When asked about the impacts of the ongoing pandemic on her teaching, Emmanuelle notes a reduced class size of 12 instead of 16, and praises her students’ ability to “wear their masks well.“ Then after some refection she describes a system of mutual support that naturally developed between the young learners and those leading them. “I’m certain they’re helping me get through this difficult time. You have no idea how good it is to have a four-year-old greet you by saying, ‘Miss Emmanuelle, I’m so glad you’re here today!’”

Teaching About Trees

Joe Stavish doesn’t need any reflection time to summarize the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on his work. “The new challenge to me as an outdoor educator is working with students who are watching a screen.” The Associate Director for Community Education at Tree Pittsburgh laments months spent planning and presenting programs in which students never have the opportunity to get their hands dirty. “If you’re limited to showing pictures,” he explains, “the wow factor just isn’t there.”

Joe Stavish holding a hickory leaf in pre-pandemic times.

Tree Pittsburgh is a 15-year-old non-profit organization dedicated to the restoration and protection of our region’s urban forest through tree planting and care, education, advocacy, and land conservation. Joe’s role, in the eight years he’s worked for Tree Pittsburgh, is to make sure the organization’s contact with communities it serves are as broad as possible. He kids about “cradle-to-the-grave” points of contact before listing near parallel audience segments, K-12 school classes, scout groups, youth groups, university students, neighborhood groups, adult classes, and garden clubs.

Some of the presentations he is involved with are part of formal programs, such as One Tree Per Child, a school-focused tree-planting initiative, or Explorer’s Guide, a collaborative effort with Pittsburgh’s Park Rangers for 4^th and 5^th grades that is scheduled to soon expand beyond its initial test audience in the City’s Northside neighborhoods. Other programs can currently be described as situational. “Teachers have been eager to have any type of virtual program we want to present.” Joe concedes in recognition of the ongoing and widespread problems with remote learning.

Although Joe is concerned about the limits of screen learning, I found the videos he directed me to on an Explorer’s Guide website to be very well done. Since 2018 Tree Pittsburgh has been headquartered in a riverside campus in Lawrenceville spacious enough to include what is termed a Heritage Tree Nursery. Much of a short video titled, The Life Cycle of a Tree, was shot in the nursery, a facility at the forefront of urban forestry. I never cried “Wow” while I watched the segment, but I learned a lot.

Go For a Color Walk

by Jenise Brown

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