Lesson Plan

National Park Legacy - Coyotes in our Cities!
Grades 3 - 4

Remote sensing camera captures an image of a coyote.
Grade Level:
Upper Elementary: Third Grade through Fifth Grade
Subject:
Literacy and Language Arts,Science
Lesson Duration:
30 Minutes
State Standards:
3-LS4-3
4-LS1-2
Thinking Skills:
Understanding: Understand the main idea of material heard, viewed, or read. Interpret or summarize the ideas in own words. Applying: Apply an abstract idea in a concrete situation to solve a problem or relate it to a prior experience. Analyzing: Break down a concept or idea into parts and show the relationships among the parts. Creating: Bring together parts (elements, compounds) of knowledge to form a whole and build relationships for NEW situations.

Essential Question

Will pet food and trash provide wild animals a healthy meal? Every yard can feed wildlife!

Objective

Students will graph the results of urban coyotes’ diet studies and will model coyotes’ food-finding adaptations.

Background

  1. Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area is located alongside Los Angeles and San Fernando Valley neighborhoods, but beaches, wild mountain areas, unique plants growing in a Mediterranean climate, and a variety of wildlife are part of this urban habitat as well. In this lesson, students will learn specifically about urban coyotes, whose original living areas have been fragmented with housing and city services. SMMNRA ecologists have studied coyotes and have learned that while they prefer to avoid humans and spend time in natural vegetation, coyotes are finding food and surviving in city habitats.
  2. The SMMNRA Nature Neighbor Project prioritizes reducing conflicts between humans and wildlife so that they can coexist and share available habitat. Ecologists have learned that coyotes are opportunistic eaters, and they will scavenge through trash as well as feed on traditional foods such as rodents, birds, insects, and grass. Coyote and human conflicts can often be eliminated when human-related food is not available.
  3. SMMNRA Ecologists’ research addresses the public’s concern for the safety of pets when coyotes are seen in neighborhoods. Results show that natural prey such as rabbits, rats, gophers, and squirrels are still preferred by urban coyotes. Human-related foods make up 30% of coyotes’ diet! Fruit fallen from trees is most common, but 1% is attributed to pets. Fencing, kennels, and bringing pets indoors at night is strongly recommended when wildlife share our urban habitats
  4. Currently, SMMNRA Ecologists are currently coordinating a citizen science project where volunteers are collecting coyote scat from many Los Angeles locations. Volunteers also dissecting it for clues about coyotes’ diet preferences after the scat has been treated/sterilized. The Chicago area has completed this same type of research, and students will graph the results of 1,429 dissected scats. In the “Lesson Preview” section, students are introduced to another current SMMNRA coyote research project where two radio-collared urban coyotes are being monitored in the Loa Angeles basin. Scientists are learning where coyotes spend time, hunt for food, and raise young. 100 data points from radio collar signals are listed here.
  5. Coyotes have keen hearing, and they use this sensory receptor along with their highly adapted canine noses to successfully locate and hunt prey. Coyote ears are very large- larger than wolves’ ears! Coyotes can respond to sounds a mile distant, and their ears have muscles attached to them allowing them to move to detect sound. They can hear higher-pitched sounds than humans as well.
  6. Canine noses have at least 1,000 times the number of scent gland cells than human noses. Canine brains are smaller overall than human brains, but the region that interprets smells is ten times larger in canines! Finally, air movement in a canine’s process of nasal inhale and exhale cycle is quite complex. Since coyotes are a canine species, they are highly adapted to find and hunt prey.

Preparation

  1. Download and make copies of the scaled bar graph template for each student.
  2. Cut several 18’’ sections from a discarded garden hose or from an inexpensive ½ inch drinking water hose. Cut a hole in the bottom of a 9oz. paper cup so that it can be threaded snuggly onto one end of the hose.
  3. Have available several sizes of paper cups, paper, and scotch tape.
  4. A cup of water, cotton balls, hard peppermint candy

Materials

Scale bar graph for lesson.

Download Scale Bar Graph Template

Lesson Hook/Preview

Noses and ears fashioned for finding food.

Two 30-40 minute lessons.

Procedure

 

  1. Show students the slideshow & article of the phenomena observed by an NPS Ecologist at work one night in Los Angeles tracking urban coyotes’ behavior using transmissions from radio collars.
  2. The article accompanying the slides includes maps, additional photos, and anecdotal stories from the reporter who rode along with the Ecologist. Encourage students to construct questions regarding wildlife survival when urban areas serve as their habitat.

Day One, 30-minutes

Introduce the lesson by asking students to share their experiences if they have seen wildlife in the city where they live. Explain that people living in SMMNRA are neighbors to nature and National Park Service Rangers want the public to learn to coexist with wildlife.

Allow students some time to review the coyote brochure from CA Dept. of Fish and Wildlife, and list together with a few facts about why coyotes live close to Los Angeles area neighborhoods (trash cans have food in them, pets and pet food are left outside, fallen fruit is left on the ground)

Remind students that habitats are varied, and while it may seem unusual, if coyotes can find food, an urban habitat may be one that allows them to survive well- perhaps even help eat rodents that bother city dwellers! Explain to students that scientists in the Chicago area studied urban coyotes for many years and learned what they ate, and SMMNRA scientists are currently doing the same type of work.

Distribute the graph template and ask students to add zeros to the numbers on the vertical axis so that it can be used to show the percentage of food types in coyotes’ diets.

Use the data below from the Chicago study to label diet categories and complete the graph, simplifying to the nearest 10% if appropriate. “The most common food items were small rodents (42%), fruit (23%), deer (22%), and rabbit (18%). (Scats often have more than one diet item; therefore, frequencies do not necessarily add up to 100%).”

Finally, ask students to work with partners, using their graphs to construct evidence statements, as they compare Los Angeles and Chicago coyote diets. The SMMNRA research results are listed below--note especially the absence of deer and the increase in fruit in Los Angeles habitats. “Natural prey items occurred most often in coyote’s diet. Most of the coyote’s diet in the urban area consisted of natural prey items such as; rabbits, rats, gophers, and squirrels. However, human-related foods were found in 30% of the scats analyzed for diet. Fruits from neighborhood trees (peach, plum, fig, apple and pyracantha berries) were responsible for most of the human-related food items. Even though coyotes are known to take some pets, this study detected only 1% pet occurrence in their diet.”

Day Two, 30-minutes

Remind students that SMMNRA scientists are studying urban coyotes’ diets and behaviors, and have determined that overall, coyotes are surviving well as they share habitats with city dwellers.

Explain that coyotes are members of the dog family, and dogs have two unique sense receptors--noses and ears--that contribute to their success in finding prey to eat.

Introduce the lesson by inviting students to explore models that will help them experience ways that coyotes’ noses and ears work.

Ask students to list evidence from the video that suggests that dogs (coyotes) could use their sense of smell to hunt prey. (moist noses catch odor particles, each nostril works differently to determine the direction of the smell, exhaling through a slit inside of nose pushes air back toward the nose to “repeat” a scent, a smell can be detected long after the object leaves.) In partners, ask students to open a peppermint candy wrapper- their prey- and smell it. Encourage them to repeatedly sniff the opened candy after

  1. moistening their nose with water,
  2. alternate pinching one nostril closed,
  3. fanning air from the right and left of the nose towards the nostrils.
  4. Discuss if the peppermint smell was strengthened when using any of the canine (coyote) nose models, and ask students to suggest improvements in the model designs to improve outcomes. Remind students that urban coyotes successfully hunt rodents and other small prey, most often in darkness, by following scent trails.

 

If students have had an opportunity to see coyotes in the city, chances are they will describe their behavior as shy or skittish around humans- probably because people were heard long before they were seen by the coyote! Explain that canine (coyote) hearing is adapted to hear at great distances, up to a mile away from the source of sound! Higher pitched sounds are also detected, and unlike our ears, they move forward and back with the help of muscles attached to the ears. Most obvious is the large size of coyote ears, mounted atop the head, allowing detection of sound from a wide area. Explain to students that canine (coyote) hearing is clearly an advantage if survival depends on hunting small prey. This resource is very informative about the natural history of coyotes, and the photo “shows off” a set of large ears!

Allow students to create paper cones to hold on their ears or tear a small hole in the side of a paper cup so that it can rest over the top of the students’ outer ears. These models demonstrate the ability to capture more sound waves when ears are large and can be compared to oversized ears of coyotes.

To model ear position on top of the head, resulting in capturing sound at a greater distance, allow students to try holding the hose end to one of their ears and using their other hand to manipulate the opening of the paper cup over their heads. Allow students to adjust the model designs as class time allows.

Vocabulary

  1. Coexist (with wildlife) … live in the same general area peacefully/ without conflict. In this lesson’s context, students learn that coyotes are adaptable and commonly live alongside us in urban areas if their food and shelter needs are met. They are naturally “skittish” around human activity.
  2.  Habitat…a particular environment that provides survival needs for living things.
    • The organisms and their habitat make up a system in which the parts depend on each other.
  3. Sense Receptors…the sensory organs that animals and humans use to gather information.
    • The receptors are specialized, and once the brain processes the information, perceptions, and behaviors can be observed.

Assessment Materials

Keep Wildlife Wild

Beyond pet food and trash can food resources, students may have observed wild animals in the city being hand fed and generally tamed.

The “Keep Wildlife Wild” resource describes urban coyote problems at Golden Gate National Recreation Area such as the increased risk of traffic fatalities because coyote approach vehicles expecting visitors to offer handouts. “A Fed Animal is a Dead Animal” is the phrase used at GGNRA to bring attention to this issue. Interested students could design a Nature Neighborhood road sign to discourage hand feeding of wildlife.

https://www.nps.gov/goga/learn/nature/coyote-alert.htm

Additional Resources

  1. Many city residents are composting food scraps, and this often provides a food source for wildlife.
  2. Students can discuss methods to “secure” compost areas with fencing, netting, etc.
  3. Provided here are video clip phenomena of urban wildlife eating compost.

Contact Information

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Last updated: January 20, 2022