Secondary school outreach - wildlife monitoring

Based in LCAB, I am a third year PhD student on the Adapting to the Challenges of a Changing Environment Doctoral Training Partnership (ACCE DTP). The outreach day was organised by ACCE and the Natural History Museum and invited Year 8 students from schools local to its three university partners: the universities of York, Liverpool and Sheffield, to learn more about university research. I had volunteered to run one of the PhD workshop stations.

My resources were lined out neatly on the table, a large monitor screen broadcasted the title of my presentation. The York cohort consisted of 30 students from two schools. They’d been split into four groups who would each have 15 minutes at my workshop station and in which time I hoped
to teach them about camera traps as a tool for wildlife monitoring.

Set on the table, I had a few cameras which I handed out, encouraging students to openthem up and have a good look. My first question was whether any of them had heard of camera traps before or knew what they did. Many hadn’t, but there were some good suggestions, referring to CCTV cameras used in detecting crime, or those used by photographers in hides to capture wildlife for David Attenborough-type documentaries.

I explained some of the main features of camera traps, how we can leave them in the field for long periods of time and that because they can detect passing wildlife (e.g. by movement or thermal sensors) they are a method that causes less disturbance because researchers don’t have to be present.

A night capture of a hedgehog, hard to guess but lots of good suggestions!

On the monitor, I showed some images captured during my past work looking at fox movements in a London green space, asking students to shout out if they knew the species. We started with some easy ones, everyone got the crow, and pigeon. The starling was a little trickier, as was the hedgehog - although there were some excellent mammal suggestions! We discussed how you often have to look carefully at images for clues as to what the species might be, and that cameras allowing photo bursts can help identify trickier species.

The starling was a bit trickier to guess.

Keen to avoid too much screen time, the final task was to plan our own experiment. I presented a toy red squirrel, unusually wearing a mushroom backpack (don’t ask), and explained that this individual had been spotted on campus. Our task was to try and catch footage to document its existence.

Our mysterious squirrel and the camera trap used to capture footage of its existence on campus.

I presented four images from around campus and asked the students to pick which they’d like to put the camera in and why. Interestingly, every group chose picture three. Their reasons included: plenty of trees for the squirrel to climb, and hedges and bushes for hiding. Some pointed out that other location options had paths, meaning squirrels might be disturbed by passers by, or we might get too many shots of people, both really excellent considerations which we hadn’t discussed.

The students had four images to choose from when selecting a site for their camera trap experiment, they all picked Number 3.

Now transported via imagination to our site, I asked which student would like to be the tree we fix the camera to - there were often multiple volunteers for this role. We placed a plate of pretend acorns on the floor about 10 paces from our ‘tree’ and the students had to decide the best camera placement to try and trigger our backpacking friend. After ups, downs, lefts and rights the students were happy and I, in my best puppeteering role, approached the acorns with the squirrel while the tree held our camera in position and the other students observed.

Experiment complete, we took the SD card to the computer to see if the set up was a success. All four groups managed to capture the squirrel feeding!

As the session ended and they grabbed their bags, a few came back to ask me more about the cameras. The first group hadn’t been able to check their footage because we’d run out of time and some of them came back to ask if they could check the results. I was really pleased they were engaged enough to come and find out if they’d managed the task.

I really enjoyed the chance to engage with this year group. It was great to see their enthusiasm and engagement with this important monitoring method. Hopefully they left with a better understanding of one of the ways we monitor wildlife and maybe more of an interest in doing it themselves one day.