Classroom » Multimedia
Walnut Creek: A Guide to Exploring Urban Wetlands
About this document
- Provider
- Exploris Middle School
- Date created
- May 2008
- File
- Length
- 79 pages
- License
- This document copyright ©2008. Terms of use
Related media
Learn more
- Search LEARN NC for animals, field guide, habitat, nature, North Carolina, science, Wake County, Walnut Creek, and wetlands.
In the classroom
In May 2008, Exploris Middle School students presented a field guide to the Walnut Creek wetlands to the City of Raleigh to use at the city’s new urban wetlands center. The students began working on their field guide in September 2007. Over the school year, they explored a two mile area of near by Walnut Creek. Every Friday they investigated the wetlands. Using cameras and waterproof journals, they recorded everything they saw and experienced, from tracks made by raccoons and coyotes to the lowliest leopard slugs and sea lampreys. The students were amazed at the number and variety of animals they found.
What had once been a dump during the first half of the 20th century has been reclaimed by volunteers and life now abounds in the area which is only 2 miles south of downtown Raleigh. Birds, insects, amphibians, reptiles, mollusks, spiders, fish, crustaceans, annelids, and mammals live in their natural world surrounded by the rush of city traffic.
This 72 page field guide is divided in to zones, from the water to the canopy. Each page is devoted to an animal. Information includes the common and scientific name, the season when it lives in Walnut Creek, key field marks, key behaviors, where they are found, and a description of what the students saw. Each animal is represented by a photograph and a beautiful drawing.
Download
Available as PDF (79 pages)
Download document (Right-click or option-click)
