Class Field Trip

As part of my second master naturalist class, I attended anther field trip today. We had a busy outdoor day planned from 9 until almost 5:30. I loaded fresh batteries in my camera before I left and then forgot it on the kitchen counter. I'll be getting photos from my classmates and when I do, I'll post some of them. We looked at wolves. I saw 55+ wolves today. We studied them. We ate lunch by them. We saw them fed. We made plaster casts of their paw prints. We saw them sleeping and eating and playing and pacing and rubbing their sides against the chain link fence. We saw some charge after a fresh deer heart while others stood back and let the more aggressive animals have it. I've never seen a wolf in the wild and hope I do get that chance someday. We saw cougar, lynx, bobcat, coyote, gray and red fox, porcupines, raccoons, and 8 black bear. We saw red foxes that were red but others were orange, gold, black and even white. Did you know the word for a group of porcupine? A group of porcupine is called a prickle. Porcupine are the second largest rodents in our state and generally don't hang out in prickles. They're more solitary. Babies are born with quills but the quills don't harden until an hour after birth. Otherwise, ouch! Baby porcupines are called porcupets and are ready to climb a tree an hour after birth. We fed the bears. The bears had a lucky day as we fed them carbs. A bakery donated excess product. We threw bread, cinnamon rolls, bread sticks, chocolate covered doughnuts and powdered sugar doughnuts over the fence. The bear inhaled the powdered sugar doughnuts first and left the bread for last. I first came to admire bears when I was pregnant. I was jealous of their ability to give birth while sleeping through the winter. I found out today that the average female bear, weighing 200-300 pounds, gives birth to a cub a half pound in weight. The small size of the newborn cubs really surprised me. Not only do they get to give birth while hibernating, but their babies are so much smaller than ours. That is totally not fair. We watched a deer necropsy. At first we couldn't tell what had killed the deer but once it was opened to the area above the diaphragm, we could see a lot of blood pooled around the heart and lungs. It had been hit by a car in the chest area. We also got a close look at some raptors including a red tailed hawk, screech owl, long-eared owl, peregrine falcon, and rough legged hawk. We got to hold some of the birds. I held a red tailed hawk and a long-eared owl-what a tremendous thrill. I had to pay $200 to take this class but today was totally worth the cost.