Last week my partner and I finished collecting our data and now we are analyzing it. We went and retrieved the 25 camera traps, and the last of our funnel and pitfall traps. On Monday, we participated in the extension and outreach portion of our program for with the PALS event. Each of our groups set up a station at Celery Bog Nature Trail where we used creative games to teach the kids 8-14 what our projects were about and how they were important. Avery and I had to do a slight adaptation to ours and teach kids about sound waves because we use audio recorders in our research projects for bats and birds. We taught the children that sound can be heard, but we can see it too by implementing spectrograms. We created a poster board with information about bats and how they use echolocation to communicate. We added various native species to Indiana paired up with their respective spectrogram to our presentation. As an interactive activity we played the sounds of those different animals and had the kids guess which animal they thought it was and demonstrated how the intervals and pitches visually look on a spectrogram. Another interactive activity we had with them is giving pictures of those respective animals with their sound wave attached to the back and had them act out how they perceive the animals to move when we played that sound. For example, if we played a deer bleat, then the deer group would prance around as representation of that animal. That activity wasn’t receptive by the older audiences of 11-14 so we had to shift our activity on the spot. We had the kids race to the sounds we played, but with a catch. They had to act out that animal as they raced to the finish line. For example, if we played a barred owl hoot, then they had to flap their wings to the finish line. This was supposed to be a representative of how sound moves. The activity wasn’t the most cohesive, but I do believe this exercise was more preferred. To me this was a huge teaching moment. I learned that not everything will work the first time, and sometimes we must modify what we’re doing to get better results. On Saturday we participated in Riverfest as volunteers where we presented our research to eager ears as they passed by our tent. The funniest thing was the family reactions to our stuffed coyote and big brown bat. The children squealed quite a lot when they touched it. Some people didn’t think it was a pleasant sight, but it was funny, nonetheless. Overall, the week was good and now my partner and I are working on completing our results so we can finish our manuscript and final PowerPoint presentation.

Pun Submission: Baseball players are pretty BATletic (buh-dum-tsh)