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.



  1. 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.)




  2. What type of animal do you think left the sign?




  3. What was the animal doing when it left the sign? How can you tell?




  4. 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.)




  5. For each of the above questions, if you could do anything you wanted, how would you find out if your answers are correct?