Teaching Animal Tracking in Juvenile Detention

January 2019

How do you teach high school students about animal tracking if they are incarcerated, and can’t go out in nature? Well, you bring the tracks to them! On Wednesday January 9th, IAE Ecological Education Coordinator Tyler Knapp and Stacy Moore, Ecological Education Program Director, did just that at the Linn-Benton Juvenile Detention Center in Albany, Oregon. We brought a box full of rubber animal track casts, a bag of sand, plaster of paris, bowls, handouts and other supplies through several locked steel doors, and into the classroom within the cell block.

To start the lesson, Stacy asked the six students to write down all of the animal signs besides tracks that they could think of. How can you tell if an animal has been somewhere even if you don’t see it? Things that the students mentioned included: owl pellets under a tree, spider webs, bird poop on a car, the echolocation sounds of bats, nests, scratch marks on trees, holes in the ground, and leaves that have been chewed on.

Our first activity was called “Winter Tracking Wonderland,” and included a drawing of a snow covered forest with various animal tracks throughout it (including human). The students used cut out drawings of animals and had to place them on the matching tracks in the forest scene.

It was rewarding to bring a nature lesson inside the walls of the Juvenile Detention Center, to youth who don’t have access to nature due to their incarceration. They were some of the most appreciative, well-behaved, and respectful students that I have ever worked with. Several of the students told us “thank you for coming in, we learned a lot and had great fun!” Institute for Applied Ecology greatly appreciates funding from the John Diehl Memorial Fund, which allows us to reach numerous students at Juvenile Detention and Oak Creek Youth Authority with lessons in science and ecology.