Urban Wildlife

Talk about the collective nouns for different groups of animals. For example: herd, flock, colony, litter. For help consult this extensive list of Animal Collective Nouns.

Identify urban wildlife in your area. Discuss the difference between deer, squirrels and other wild creatures and those we keep as pets, such as dogs and cats, or farm animals such as chickens and cows. What makes an animal wild or not wild (domesticated)? Find additional information on Wild or Domestic?

Write a description of an urban wildlife animal. Include size, color, identifying marks or qualities. Do not tell the name of the animal. Have other members of the class try to identify the animal.

Sort teacher-made images of animals into categories based on wild and domesticated (tame). Count the number of each category.

Gather students outside to count urban wildlife that they can see. Watch for squirrels, birds, insects, and others that cross through the neighborhood. Categorize the animals that they find. Create a graph of the data — perhaps listing mammals, insects, birds, etc. as the categories. Help them to understand that many animals roam at night and that the ones they were able to see travel by day.

Create bird houses for your school's urban wildlife. Measure and cut the materials to create a home that will encourage birds to visit. Find some plans that work for your class at Artists Helping Children, or invent your own.

Things that people do can affect the world around them. People can reduce their effects on the land, water, air, and other living things.

Living things need water, air, and resources from the land, and they live in places that have the things they need.

Examples of animals changing their environment could include a squirrel digs in the ground to hide its food.

Different animals use their body parts in different ways to see, hear, grasp objects, protect themselves, move from place to place, and seek and take in food.

Animals have body parts that capture and convey different kinds of information needed for growth and survival. Animals respond to these inputs with behaviors that help them survive.

Information should be obtained from text readings and media provided by the teacher. Examples of patterns of behaviors could include the signals that offspring make (such as crying, cheeping, and other vocalizations) and the responses of the parents (such as feeding, comforting, and protecting the offspring).

There are many different kinds of living things in any area, and they exist in different places on land and in water.

Emphasis is on the diversity of living things in each of a variety of different habitats.

Examples of evidence could include needs and characteristics of the animals and habitats involved. The organisms and their habitat make up a system in which the parts depend on each other.

A variety of natural hazards result from natural processes. Humans cannot eliminate natural hazards to wildlife but can take steps to reduce their impacts.

Many characteristics involve both inheritance and environment.

The environment also affects the traits that an animal develops. Some characteristics result from individuals' interactions with the environment.

Being part of a group helps animals obtain food, defend themselves, and cope with changes. Groups may serve different functions and vary dramatically in size.

Changes organisms go through during their life form a pattern.

Different sense receptors are specialized for particular kinds of information, which may be then processed by the animal's brain. Animals are able to use their perceptions and memories to guide their actions.

Animals have various body systems with specific functions for sustaining life.

Human activities in agriculture, industry, and everyday life have effects on the land, vegetation, streams, ocean, air, and even outer space. Individuals and communities can often mitigate these effects through innovation and technology.

When the environment changes in ways that affect a place's physical characteristics or availability of food and water, some animals survive and reproduce, others move to new locations, yet others move into the transformed environment, and some die.

Populations live in a variety of habitats, and change in those habitats affects the organisms living there.

Populations of animals are classified by their characteristics.

Examples of cause and effect relationships could be animals that have better camouflage coloration than other animals may be more likely to survive and therefore more likely to leave offspring.

The food of almost any kind of animal can be traced back to plants. Organisms are related in food webs in which some animals eat plants for food and other animals eat the animals that eat plants… Organisms can survive only in environments in which their particular needs are met. A healthy ecosystem is one in which multiple species of different types are each able to meet their needs in a relatively stable web of life.

Human activities can positively and negatively influence the biosphere, sometimes altering natural habitats and ecosystems.

Examples of the design process include examining human interactions and designing feasible solutions that promote stewardship. Examples can include water usage (such as stream and river use, aquifer recharge, or dams and levee construction); land usage (such as urban development, agriculture, wetland benefits, stream reclamation, or fire restoration); and pollution (such as of the air, water, or land).

Natural selection leads to the predominance of certain traits in a population, and the suppression of others.

Emphasis is on using concepts of natural selection in animals.

Biodiversity describes the variety of species found in Earth's ecosystems. The completeness or integrity of an ecosystem's biodiversity is often used as a measure of its health.

Ecosystems are dynamic in nature; their characteristics can vary over time. Disruptions to any physical or biological component of an ecosystem can lead to shifts in all its populations.

Similarly, predatory interactions may reduce the number of organisms or eliminate whole populations of organisms... Although the species involved in these competitive, predatory, and mutually beneficial interactions vary across ecosystems, the patterns of interactions of organisms with their environments are shared.

• Organisms, and populations of organisms, are dependent on their environmental interactions both with other living things and with nonliving factors.

• Growth of organisms and population increases are limited by access to resources.

• Emphasis is on cause and effect relationships between resources and growth of individual organisms and the numbers of organisms in ecosystems during periods of abundant and scarce resources.