This semester, I helped to organize a Steelhead Trout release on campus, as part of a program where elementary school students release trout that they had raised in the classroom. Back in February, I was approached by Michael Knappman, who volunteers at University Elementary at La Fiesta Elementary in Rohnert Park. One of their classes was participating the the Water Agency’s ‘Steelhead in the Classroom’ program (https://www.sonomawater.org/steelhead-in-the-classroom), and would have fry to release in May. Since, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) has designated Copeland among the acceptable release tributaries of the Russian River, Michael wanted to know if I’d be interested in helping him arrange for the fish to be released on the stretch of Copeland Creek that runs through the Sonoma State campus.
My Vertebrate Biology students deployed a wildlife camera on April 7th, which I retrieved on May 20. Water was flowing in the creek throughout the entire deployment. The only unfortunate thing is that I must have set the photo resolution too high, as my 2GB memory card ran out of space on May 2. But even so, I was excited to see the variety of wildlife that we caught on the camera. This entry features just some of my favorite shots. All my wildlife camera photos (from 2016 to present) can be found on wildlifeinsights.org.
Introducing my new favorite app: Padlet! I first encountered the app during an on-campus training – TIPS Toward Justice – and saw its potential for use in my own classes.
I’m using it as a way of gathering real-time, in-class feedback during class. Students are able to post anonymous comments from their laptops or smartphones, and then we collectively discuss the things they’ve posted. I started out on the very first day of class with some low-stakes questions:
Now – a few weeks into the semester – I’m including a mix of “how are you doing right now?” questions along with prompts that will give them a chance to talk about course content, particularly any topics that they are finding difficult. Here’s an example from my Sustainable Development course:
Rather than giving my Vertebrate Biology students a conventional written final exam, I decided to do something more adventurous: have them participate in a BioBlitz on campus so I could assess their knowledge of local wildlife and identification techniques. For anyone not familiar with the term, a BioBlitz is an effort to document biodiversity in a given location during a certain period of time. While the structure of these events can vary, the idea is to identify as many species as possible in the time you are given.
Route traveled
For this event, I allowed the students to form teams. They would be competing against one another, and also against me. I allowed them to use any materials they wanted to use – field guides, iNaturalist, etc., in order to make identifications. I, on the other hand, would only be able to count species that I could identify without any identification guides. This was actually a win/win situation for me . . . if I found the most species, YAY, I WIN! But if any of the teams find more species that I do, that means I taught them well, so again, I WIN! 🙂 Plus, I had a big bag of prizes from the dollar store, enough prizes for everyone, although the “grand prize” winning teams had first pick. There were two ways to win: to identify the highest number of vertebrates (which is how the grades would be determined), and a runner-up prize for the team that found the highest number of species across all taxonomic groups.
One of the nine teams did identify more vertebrates species than I did, and another identified more organisms than I did across all groups, a result that I was pleased with. I think the top count of vertebrates was 32 species (identified in a period of 90 minutes). I found 30 in that time. 🙂
For the first time since COVID, I’m able to take my students on field trips again, and we had a fantastic one yesterday. I took my upper division Vertebrate Biology class to one of our university’s preserves: the Fairfield Osborn Preserve on Sonoma Mountain. One of the preserve’s researchers and naturalists – Julie Wittmann – was our host for the day, and our primary target was herpetofauna (reptilian vertebrates and amphibians). We started out by surveying some of the coverboards that were established in 2015, and then we headed down to the creek to look for salamanders. All along the way, we saw AMAZING wildlife, with a couple of absolute highlights for the day.
Surveying coverboards, and a Western Skink we discovered under one of them:
This article is from April, but it’s the first I’ve heard of this. The turtles we reintroduced to Mountain Lake in SF have HAD BABIES! This is amazingly good news! These turtles had been extirpated (driven locally extinct) from the lake at some point in the past, and the fact that the introduced turtles are able to reproduce means that this population might be able to sustain itself into the future. LOVE THIS SO MUCH!
Earlier this year, I completed an online certificate through the University of Newcastle, Australia: “NHI101x: Drawing Nature, Science, and Culture: Natural History Illustration 101.”
I thoroughly enjoyed this 6-week course, and it genuinely helped me improve my illustration skills. Partly due to the techniques we learned and practiced, but possibly more important, by boosting my confidence as I worked through the assignments successfully. I am wholly satisfied with my progress, and am already planning to take another course in illustration in January (this time, focusing specifically on digital artwork).
Last month, I decided to do an Inktober challenge, combined with a set of “Drawlogies” prompts inspired by the science show “Ologies.” Here is the entire month’s worth of prompts. I’m re-rendering many of them in different styles, and I’ll be posting some of those as I go.
In addition to the questions provided with the videos, I’m going to ask them to do some additional field journaling, including sketches. Here are the two I drew as examples (based on the Mojave Desert video), to give them some inspiration. (They aren’t expected to render things as completely as the tortoise, but the level of detail in the plant illustration should be doable by everyone).
As an aside, I think that Gopherus agassizii was the first scientific name I ever learned. My parents had hand towels with these tortoises (along with the name). Wow. It’s not actually too surprising that I’m such a nerd.
