A Lesson Plan from the Virginia State Parks'
Your Backyard Classrooms
Whose Clues?
Clue Matching Exercise
Look at the clues you find during your visit or on a diagram provided by your teacher and answer the following questions.
- What kind of a sign is it? (Track, scat, evidence of feeding (such as
a gnawed branch), actual remains (such as a bone, feather or shed skin),
a nest, pathway, tunnel or other sign.)
- What type of animal do you think left the sign?
- What was the animal doing when it left the sign? How can you tell?
- With scat or owl pellets, what had the animal been eating? (Neat
stuff can be found by examining pellets or poking around in scat with a
stick. Most wild animal scat is relatively odorless.)
- For each of the above questions, if you could do anything you wanted,
how would you find out if your answers are correct?