Patrick McShea

April 7, 2021 by wpengine

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.

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.

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.

Changing Seats in Changing Times

If only classroom seating changes were the biggest disruption facing teachers and students this fall. During a recent interview Ellen Sanin, Post-Secondary Coordinator for St. Anthony School Programs, mentioned the switch from group tables to tray tables as an example of a physical COVID-19 adjustment. Within the pair of classrooms at Duquesne University’s Fisher Hall that serve as her home base, the flexibility of individual seating allows for social distancing. Like every other teacher, the far bigger adjustment she’s currently dealing with involves the drastic reduction in enrichment opportunities for her students.

At eight locations in the Pittsburgh area, St. Anthony School Programs offer inclusive education for students age 5 -21 with primary diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder, Down Syndrome, and Intellectual Disabilities. At the Duquesne University site where she has worked for the past five years, Ellen is responsible for teaching gym, technology skills, and job preparedness to 29 students between the ages of 18 and 21.

Although the disruptions she and her students faced in the wake of the mid-March lock down are hard to imagine, Ellen’s summary of the turbulent time is understated. “Like everyone else, we went to remote learning, but with a population with particular challenges to using the technology – some who can’t read, and some who are nonverbal.” This fall, in-person teaching has resumed, with instruction for three of her students restricted to on-line.

In former years, post-secondary students and instructors in the St. Anthony Program routinely visited as many as 20 different Pittsburgh sites as part of job preparedness training. Current COVID-19 restrictions, Ellen explained, have reduced these field trip destinations to a handful of locations on the Duquesne University campus, the Allegheny County Court House, and a life skills and home skills training apartment in Squirrel Hill. “We made regular visits to Carnegie Library locations, but libraries, like lots of other places are operating under new guidelines.”

Because Ellen in also a veteran museum educator, with deep experience teaching summer camp programs, the interview closed with a question about her insight into parallels between the students she works with on a daily basis and those she has taught during summer. “The main difference is age, of course, but the similarities in interests are remarkable. One of my current students is fascinated with dinosaurs. He would have loved being in a dinosaur class.”

Western Bird, Eastern Waters

If you enter Bird Hall from the Grand Staircase Balcony, the first taxidermy mount you’ll encounter is an American Avocet, an elegant species commonly associated with the shallow margins of western lakes. The life-like preserved remains of the 20-inch high, long-legged, and long-billed bird occupy the lower-right position within a display case visually dominated by a flamingo. “Adaptations for Feeding” is the comparative theme for the display’s six preserved birds, a select group the Avocet earned membership among by virtue of its long, reed-thin, and slightly up-turned bill.

The species, known to science as Recurvirostra Americana, feeds by swinging its bill scythe-like through the water to capture small invertebrates. Remarkably, on a recent evening, I was able to observe an Avocet demonstrate the technique in waters less than three miles from the museum.

American Avocet (lower left) downstream from boats moored at the South Side Marina. Credit: Amy Henrici.

On July 24, a local birder used an online forum to share a lunchtime sighting of an avocet in the shallow waters of Monongahela River near the Birmingham Bridge. The report enabled other birders to make quick plans for riverside visits, and by 7:00 p.m. I was among a handful of binocular-bearing observers who watched the bird for 30 minutes from a South Side path before it flew upstream and out of sight.

American Avocet in Monongahela waters. Credit: Amy Henrici.

In the following days I tried to retroactively enrich the firsthand observation. I read the American Avocet account on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s informative All About Birds website, re-read relevant passages in The Wind Birds, author Peter Matthiessen’s 1967 tribute to the diverse tribe of species collectively termed “shore birds,” and finally, made a narrowly-focused visit to Bird Hall.

Kneeling on the marble floor in front of the avocet, I was able to inspect a key physical feature that days earlier had been concealed by murky Monongahela waters – the species’ fully webbed feet. Studying anatomical details on taxidermy mounts can enhance field observations of wildlife. This statement can be something of a mantra for natural history museum educators.

Teaching in a Changed World

For several years Leslie Vandegrift has used materials from the Educator Loan Collection to enhance reading lessons for kindergarten through third grade students. As the librarian for West Hills Primary School in the Armstrong School District, she’s put authentic objects to use in building vocabulary, sparking curiosity about the ideas conveyed through ever longer strands of words and sentences, and promoting the reading of all kinds of books. In the library of West Hills Primary, materials from the museum illustrating topics ranging from nocturnal animals to the wildlife discoveries of the Lewis and Clark Expeditions have helped diminish the 44 highway miles separating the two buildings.

When reached by phone a dozen days before the start of in-person classes, the 24 year veteran educator expressed concern about how the school year would proceed and whether her library could function as it did in the past. As she summarized, “The most challenging part of this new normal, is that the students will be unable to check out books for at least the first semester of school. There is zero sharing of materials in our school building in order to keep our students as safe as possible. It’s disheartening to engage students in new topic areas and authors, but not be able to allow them to pursue it independently.” Student well-being was her utmost priority, and she expressed pride in knowing that was also the case for every one of her co-workers.

If the spread of COVID-19 pushes her school to on-line instruction, Leslie expressed confidence that the transition would be far smoother than what occurred across the country back in mid-March. Days of in-service training in August were devoted to mastering the intricacies and capabilities of a digital learning management platform called “Canvas,” and the first order of business after the opening day of school will be getting the students comfortable interacting with the electronic interface.

Leslie’s description of the learning platform’s flexibility leads me to remind more teachers about the Educator Loan Program’s continued importance as a resource. Materials can be borrowed to create digital products. Cell phone still images or brief videos of authentic objects can improve lessons presented on learning platforms. Your productions don’t have to meet the standards of the library displays at West Hill Primary School for learning to occur.

Armored Advantage

A folded hindwing of this lightning bug is visible beneath a raised forewing.

As adaptations go, the hardened forewings of beetles have a long track record of success. The paired structures, known as elytra (or singularly as elytron), don’t contribute significant aerodynamic advantage to beetle flight. Because they protect the delicate hindwings under all other circumstances, however, elytra help to ensure the capability of flight whenever it’s necessary.

Evidence for the survival advantages conveyed by the wing covers is impressive. The order Coleoptera, the scientific category of beetles, contains more than 380,000 named and described species, a figure that represents nearly a quarter of currently known animal species.

In Dinosaur Armor, the world premiere exhibition occupying the R. P. Simmons Family Gallery for the next 10 months, a colorful array of preserved beetles illustrates the insects’ built-in shield adaptation.

Visitors interested in elytra can visually study a far larger and more diverse beetle display just outside the Dinosaur Armor exit. Here hundreds of curated specimens from the scientific collection have been arranged in a wall-sized display.

Collectively and individually, this mass of pinned beetles serves to reinforce an unstated theme of Dinosaur Armor: functional exterior armor does not necessarily preclude natural beauty.

Teaching About Local Wildlife with the City Nature Challenge

iNaturalist and City Nature Challenge History

How to Participate in City Nature Challenge

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Carnegie Museum of Natural History Blog Citation Information

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Ocean Lessons

Materials for Ocean Lessons from the Educator Loan Collection

Classroom Aquariums

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Carnegie Museum of Natural History Blog Citation Information

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Changing Seats in Changing Times

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Western Bird, Eastern Waters

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Teaching in a Changed World

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