6 March 2025
The Upper Hopkins Landcare Network and Project Platypus are continuing their biodiversity field trips for the Ararat Rural School Cluster in the 2025 school year.
For our first cluster day of the year held at Maroona Primary School, the theme was animal homes! This time we had an even bigger set of activities, with separate activities tailored for the younger and older grades respectively.
Grade 3-6 students learned about local tree-hollow dependent species like gliders and owlet nightjars, which are declining due to the loss of old trees. Recognizing that new hollows take decades, students worked with Landcare's Nick Moll to match nest box designs (specialized for different glider species and more general ones) to potential inhabitants. They discussed features like footholds and entrance sizes for species exclusion, as well as drainage, insulation, and cooling. The small glider entrance holes highlighted their ability to access tight, predator-safe spaces.
Next the students turned to nest boxes that had been made by local volunteers but needed one more importent step - a layer of protective and camouflaging paint. These boxes would be destined for fire-affected areas near Grampians National Park. Using a few base colours, the students mixed a variety of shades for bush-inspired camouflage designs, ensuring the new homes would integrate well into the environment. Each student inscribed their name and school inside their box. This will allow Project Platypus to monitor the installed nest boxes, providing students and schools with updates on their inhabitants!
Upper grade students then explored the need for continuous tree corridors for gliders, which can glide up to 50m. Gaps in trees due to land clearing make it dangerous for them to find food, mates, and homes, increasing deaths from cars and predators. To understand this, led by Project Platypus's Amelia Kingston, the students built paper gliders. Experimenting with paper thickness and weights, they tested designs and learned about lift, drag, and thrust, relating it to both aircraft and gliding animals.
While the upper years learned about animals that live in tree hollows, the P through 2nd graders spent their day with Landcare facilitator Elia Pirtle learning about a different kind of animal home - bug homes! We started off in the classroom, with a microscope projected to the big screen. Elia showed off her collection of different bug homes she has found or photographed, and the students tried to guess all the different materials that invertebrates use to build their homes, like mud, sticks, leaves, bark, and silk. There were some surprises though... students were thrilled to learn about invertebrates that build homes out of spit, poop, and even the living bodies of other invertebrates!
Now that we all had some ideas about what a good bug home might look like, we all headed outside to build our own mini bug hotels. The students were provided a biodegradable coffee cup to form the walls of their mini hotel, along with an assortment of natural materials to fill it with. This included bamboo sticks with hollow centres (perfect for native bees), she-oak cones with lots of tiny crevices, straw, leaves, sticks and twigs. Some students even rolled little balls of mud for species like spider wasps that need to collect mud to create safe little capsules for their babies. The hotels were extremely diverse, with so many creative and thoughtful personal touches provided by the students, like shade sails, and scaffolding for webs. Elia then showed the teachers the best ways to tuck these little hotels away in dry places around their own school grounds, and schools were able to take their students’ hotels back with them at the end of the day.
After lunch, students played two energetic games led by Nick. One game showed younger kids the importance of ground debris for animal homes, similar to musical chairs. Various items represented natural debris, and students each chose an animal to embody, foraging and playing. When "predators!" was called, animals had to hide under the debris, but there wasn't enough for everyone. Those left out were "eaten" by teachers (the predators) and became predators or humans. After each round, "humans" removed some debris, reducing available shelter. Surviving animals then foraged again until the next predator call. With fewer hiding spots each round, fewer animals survived. The students had lots of fun choosing their animals and rushing for cover under debris. And even better, it helped teach the students an important lesson about why we need to ensure there are lots of rocks, logs, leaf litter, small shrubs and grasses on the ground to make homes for animals.
Students from grade 3, 4, 5 and 6 played a 'hollows game' of tag where some students were chosen to be predators and everyone remaining became prey animals. There were a number of safe areas ('hollows') scattered around, but they were only safe when there was 'food' (played by balls) in them. Prey animals had to collect food on plates and run back to a hollow. But at any moment predators could come along and knock the food out of their hands, or eat them! Students were able to see why the number of hollows in the landscape were important, both as places to raise young and for as safe refuges for prey animals after habitat loss or fires. Incredibly, even after lots of scheming and deciding how best to work together, our predators just weren't able to capture all the prey animals, with a small handful always outwitting them.
We look forward to our next Landcare cluster day in August and would like to thank Maroona Primary School for hosting our 'Animal Homes' incursion and the incredible teachers and principals at our 5 cluster schools for all their help and enthusiasm on the day!
Elia Pirtle
Landcare Facilitator and Communications Officer