Pleasure Beach Teaching
Pleasure Beach teaching continues as the Bridgeport WildLife Guards are really reaching the people heading to the shore these hot summer days during the height of vacation season. A varied audience of fishermen, beachgoers and sunbathers, families and children, and naturalists are all interacting with our crew by taking brochures about birds like the American Oystercatcher or Piping Plover, signing the Be A Good Egg pledge to help protect waterbirds on our beaches, or enjoying some of the hands-on activities the Guards have to offer. Let’s take a look… Amazingly there are only a...
Read MoreWildLife Guards Training – Netting Dragonflies
Training week for the Bridgeport WildLife Guards Crew Leaders continues! We will be adding some new lesson plans and activities for the WildLife Guards this year both in conservation survey work and educational outreach. While much of our work is focused on birds we felt that considering Pleasure Beach is an important migratory hub for butterflies and dragonflies that we should teach the WildLife Guards about some of the insects that they can expect to see moving through the gardens and fields of milkweed, goldenrod and so forth. I created a couple lists of ten expected butterfly and...
Read MoreTeaching the Teachers
Throughout the past few years of working for RTPI, I’ve heard the phrase “teaching the teachers” a number of times. From my understanding, at one time this meant equipping school teachers with the proper materials and knowledge to take their classes out into nature and teach their students place-based education. RTPI education staff traveled extensively to carry out teacher workshops and engage students in learning about the natural world. As the years have gone on, the approach to carrying out that phrase has shifted, but the focus has remained: passing our knowledge and...
Read MoreProject Wild America Youth Ambassadors: Chadakoin River
During 2015, the Roger Tory Peterson Institute launched its Project Wild America Youth Ambassadors program employing six high school students and two college aged students. Throughout the course of the summer months, the PWA students worked alongside RTPI conservation staff to evaluate the Chadakoin River Corridor in the City of Jamestown. This urban river was found to be recovering from its long history of factory pollutants, channelization and overuse. It hosts a variety of flora and fauna including some that are quite rare within the state of New York. Species such as the Spiny Softshell...
Read MoreGIS Lesson
After spending some time getting familiar with a GPS system last week, JCC students took their data to the next level through their lesson in GIS with RTPI Research Associate Dr. Peter Beeson yesterday afternoon. Students mapped their GPS way-points and were able to incorporate other useful information in the form of layers into their maps. They got a little taste of what GIS mapping is capable of and saw how it is extremely useful in the field of environmental conservation. It was a great lesson for all and the students made some pretty snazzy maps by the end of the afternoon!
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