Exploring Outdoors at Oxbow Nature Observation Area in Reno

There are many wonderful places to visit in the Reno/Sparks area where you can get outdoors and learn about nature. One of our favorite locations is the Oxbow Nature Observation Area, 3100 Dickerson Road, Reno, Nevada. Located just west of downtown Reno, Oxbow is one of our field sites for Classrooms Unleashed.

In a 1-hour visit, you’ll be able to see some amazing wildlife and enjoy the fresh air safely and at a distance from other guests. It is a 0.8-mile trail loop within 22-acres of nature study area. Also, it’s good for all skill levels and accessible year-round.

The park is open daily from 8 am until sundown; it is best to visit the park early in the day to avoid crowds. Please note there are no dogs allowed, and it is easy to access with plenty of on-site parking. As you start the trail, take note of the signs at the trailhead as they explain why the park is called Oxbow and some of the wildlife you might see.

Picnic area located at the end of the trail.

As you travel down the trail, you will quickly come to a fork in the road that gives you three options: left toward the main trail; right toward a nice observation of the oxbow — a U-shaped curve in the Truckee River; or up, which leads you to an observation deck. We recommend that you start with the trail leading “up” as it gives you a bird’s eye view of the park. Speaking of birds, Oxbow is a wonderful place to go for bird observation. This year alone, 76 different species of birds have been observed at the park, making it a great destination to be introduced to animal observation. You might also see a wide variety of squirrels, snakes, and even deer.

After the stop at the observation deck, you will pass by the Truckee River, a great place to make even more observations! The rest of the trail is linear and should be easy for you to navigate. You will know you have reached the end of the trail when you reach the picnic area (see photo), which is a great place to sit down, eat a snack, and enjoy the nature around you.

Take a moment at the picnic area to sit still for a moment and see what you can observe. On your way back to the parking area, make sure to stop by the small deck by the river as it boasts a beautiful and expansive view.  

100 Days of Birds

by Gabrielle Tribelli

Recently, a friend shared with me The 100 Day Project: an art project for individuals to explore creativity independently and generate new inspiration daily for 100 days. It’s a personal project, but also has a hugely supportive community behind it as people tag #The100DayProject to their daily creations online. So I thought I’d give it a try--what’s 100 days anyway? It can’t be that long …

I’m on day 22, and although I have a lot of time to go, I’ve made plenty of new findings and new friends. Bird friends!

I recently moved to Portola, California as a science instructor with Sierra Nevada Journeys and I’ve become more aware of the incredible wildlife around me — both familiar and unfamiliar. I keep getting this feeling of, I want to know more; I need to know more. My fellow scientists are so intelligent — each bringing their own knowledge of flora (plants), fauna (animals), and natural science — that I am constantly inspired by them to gain more knowledge. One area of fauna, or animals, that I want to improve my knowledge of are birds. So I thought, why not use my love for painting and art to learn about the birds around me in a way that seems tangible for me. I decided my personal project is to watercolor one bird a day.

One morning my housemates and I awoke quietly— the loudest sound coming from the birch tree in the backyard, covered in yellow sprinkles. The yellow sprinkles were Townsend’s Warblers tickling our ears with their sweet-pitched songs. I painted my first bird that day. Twenty-two days have gone by since, and my bird-a-day project has opened my eyes wider to the sky, the trees, and the ground--searching both for birds that I know of already as well as those I’d like to discover. I think I hear a lot more these days too. My awareness of my natural surroundings has shown improvement in just two weeks.

One thing I’d love to share from my experience is that creativity is not an interest separate from the natural environment. I believe nature is the most creative pioneer of all, and I think everyone is capable of recycling its endless inspiration. Just listen to the birds’ songs.

- Gabrielle Tribelli is a former outdoor science instructor, and when she is not teaching students, she is on her way to becoming a world-renowned watercolor artist.

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Read more about The 100 Day Project.

Bird Feeder Craft

Discipline: Nature Craft
Age Range: all ages
Estimated Time: 15 minutes plus observation time
What You Need: one apple, birdseed, yarn or string; peanut butter; knife (with adult supervision); writing utensil; paper or printer (optional)

When the weather changes seasons from colder weather to the sunny skies of spring, many birds are building nests and preparing to have their young. Spend time together as a family creating this bird feeder together! When the bird feeder is finished you can hang it up outside and watch all the birds that visit your yard.

Instructions:

1. With a parent’s help or permission, carefully use a knife to cut horizontal slices of an apple. They should be around a ½ inch thick.

2. Use a pen or pencil to poke a hole near the top edge of each apple slice. Be sure not to poke too close to the edge, or the apple may break!

3. Spread peanut butter to cover both sides of each apple slice. If you are having trouble getting the peanut butter to stick, consider dabbing the sides of the apple slice with a paper towel to dry it off before spreading the peanut butter.

4. Cover the peanut butter apple in birdseed! Turning over both sides of the slice in a bowl of birdseed works great for this part of the activity.

5. Cut off around 1ft of yarn and thread it through the hole you made in the top of your apple. If it is tricky to find your original hole, just poke a new one! Then, tie off the yarn with an overhand knot.

6. Hang your bird feeder wherever you’d like! Trees and hooks near windows are great for observing birds from your own home.

7. If your bird feeder runs out of seed, or falls off of its yarn, feel free to repeat this process and make as many bird feeders as you would like.

Spend some time each day watching your new bird feeder to see what types of birds visit. It might take a few days for the birds to find your feeder, so don’t worry if you don’t have any visits the first day.

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Helpful Hints
If you’d like, you can complete this craft using a pinecone instead of apple slices! Tie a string around the top portion of the cone and then smear peanut butter all over the scales of the pinecone. Sprinkle seeds over the cone so that they stick to the peanut butter. Discuss which method might attract more birds and why.

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Reflection Questions

1. What do you notice about the birds that visit your feeder?

2. Are they large? Small?

3. Do they have any specific colors or patterns that are obvious?

Download the Making Observation Activity Page to record your findings or write them down in a notebook to help keep track of your observations

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A Resource to Identify the Birds You Observe

This website is an excellent resource for identifying and learning about the birds that live near you

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Sources:
White-breasted nuthatch photo: https://www.audubon.org/field-guide/bird/white-breasted-nuthatch
All About Birds.org. Instant ID: https://www.allaboutbirds.org/news/#/_ga=2.86386906.396297624.1588368924-1087684947.1588368924

How to Empty an Egg Without Cracking It

Discipline: Physical Science
Age Range: 8+ (adult supervision required)
Estimated Time: 10 minutes for activity; 60 minutes of drying time for the eggs
What You Need: a clean bowl; needle or thumbtack; toothpick or straightened paperclip; clear tape or masking tape; raw eggs; a towel or paper towels; soap and water

Eggs are one of nature’s most ingenious inventions! Chicken eggshells are tough yet delicate, and surprisingly, can stay whole even if you pierce them with a needle! If you’ve ever wished your decorated eggs aren’t cracked open and turned into deviled eggs, here’s a fun way to make them last longer.

Instructions:

1. Take out eggs from the refrigerator and let them sit until they are room temperature.

2. Place a small piece of tape on the top (the pointy thick end) of the egg and the bottom (the fatter end) of the egg.

3. Using a needle, poke a hole in the top of the egg through the tape. Hold the egg over the bowl to catch any of the liquid that drips out; do the same with the bottom of the egg. Wiggle the needle around in the egg to make the hole in the bottom bigger than the hole on the top.

4. Take the paperclip or toothpick and stick it in the hole in the bottom of the egg. Gently swirl the end of the paperclip inside the egg, being careful not to damage the hole. You can also do this with a needle.

5. Flip the egg over and blow air into the top of the egg, letting the contents of the egg drip into the bowl from the bottom hole. Rinse the eggshell with warm soapy water. Be sure to clean the inside and outside of the egg. Leave your egg pointy side-up to drip dry.

Once the egg is completely dry, you can start decorating!

Eggs are one of nature’s most ingenious inventions! Chicken eggshells are tough yet delicate, and surprisingly, can stay whole even if you pierce them with a needle! If you’ve ever wished your decorated eggs aren’t cracked open and turned into deviled eggs, here’s a fun way to make them last longer.

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Helpful Hints
Egg shells can be very delicate. Putting a small amount of tape in the areas you intend on poking the holes in will lessen the chances of the egg cracking. When blowing into the top of the egg, if you notice none of the liquid is coming out the bottom of the egg, stop and try to break up the yolk inside the egg. If you blow too hard into the egg while nothing is coming out the pressure may make the egg explode.

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Reflection Questions

1. Why did you swirl the paperclip inside the egg?

2. What do you think would happen if you had not broken down the egg yolk before attempting to blow it out of the shell?

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Sources:
https://www.threadandwhisk.com/how-to-blow-out-eggs
https://www.firstpalette.com/quick-how-to/blowing-out-an-egg.html
https://www.practicallyfunctional.com/egg-blowing-how-to-blow-out-an-egg/

Habitat Scavenger Hunt

Discipline: Life Science
Age Range: 7-12
Estimated Time: 20 minutes
What You Need: Habitat Scavenger Hunt activity sheet and an area outdoors

Instructions: This activity focuses on finding habitats in your area.

Ask: “Do you know what a habitat is?” 

A Habitat is the nature home of a plant or animal. 

Ask: “Did you know there are four parts of a habitat. Can you guess what they are? What four things do all animals or plants, need to survive?”

The four parts of a habitat are food, water, shelter, and space.

Ask: “Do you think there could be habitats outside?”

Go outside with your Habitat Scavenger Hunt activity sheet and see if we can find all of the different parts of a habitat. Draw or write down all of the different examples you see in the appropriate box. You have a green box on your activity sheet for the examples of food that you find, a blue box for the examples of water, a red box for space, and a black box for shelter.

Remember to use your observation skills to help you find examples of habitats. What do you feel, see, hear, or smell? What animals could use the things you found?

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New Words
Observation: Making an observation means to learn and notice more about the world around us using our five senses.
Habitat: the four things an organism needs to survive; food, water, shelter, and space.  

Helpful Hints
Adults, if you are doing this activity with your child(ren), ask them the questions and have a discussion before looking for the parts of a habitat.

Meet a Tree (Video)

Discipline: Teambuilding, SEL, and Science & Nature
Age Range: 6+
Estimated Time: 30 minutes
What You Need: A partner, a bandana or blindfold, and an outdoor space with trees (alternatively, an indoor space and some rocks)

Practice your observational skills and connect with nature by meeting a tree! In this activity, partners will trade-off leading their partner to a tree blindfolded, “meeting” the tree using senses other than vision, and attempting to find their tree after removing their blindfold based on the observations they have made.

In this 5-minute video, you’ll also find an option to try this activity indoors using rocks. Afterwards, review and discuss the reflections questions below.

Reflection Questions:

1. What senses or techniques did you use to find your tree or rock?

2. What sense did you use the least?

3. How can you use these skills to observe other things in the future?

Color A Watershed and Predict Which Way the Water Will Flow

Discipline: Environmental Science and Watershed Science
Age Range: 7-12
Estimated Time: 10-20 minutes
What You Need: A blue washable marker; a sheet of parchment paper or aluminum foil (roughly 10” x 10”); and a spray bottle filled with water

Instructions:

1. Crumple your parchment paper or aluminum foil into a loose ball.

2. Un-crumple your parchment paper or foil, but don’t smooth out all of the bumps and wrinkles. Lay the paper or foil in front of you on a table or tray. This wrinkly paper or foil represents an area of land. Notice the mountains and valleys.

3. Imagine that it is about to rain on your area of land. Where do you think the water will flow? Where will it end up? Use your blue washable marker to trace where you think the water will go on your paper or foil.

4. Let’s make it rain! Make sure your paper or foil is on a surface that can get a little wet (a table with a placemat or a cookie sheet are great options). Hold your spray bottle about 8-to-12 inches above your area of land. Spray the bottle a few times, creating an even mist over the whole area of land. Keep spraying until the water begins to flow.

5. What did you notice when it rained on your area of land? Did the water go where you predicted it would?

You have just created a model of a watershed. A watershed is an area of land where all the water drains to a certain place. This even includes water that is underground! Because of gravity, water always flows downhill from high areas to low areas. Everything on that land is also inside the watershed. In fact, you live in a watershed too! All land is divided into watersheds, based on where the water that falls on that place flows and drains.

Click here to find out in which watershed region you live.

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Sources:
https://water.usgs.gov/wsc/watershed_finder.html
https://www.longtom.org/about-ltwc/watershed-diagram/

NGSS Standards: SEP: Developing & using models; CC: Systems & system models, Patterns, Energy & matter; DCI: ESS 2: Earth’s systems

Create Your Own Journal, Step-by-Step Instructions

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Discipline: Social Emotional Learning
Age Range: 9-12 (all ages with adult supervision)
Estimated Time: 20-30 minutes
What you need: Scissors, rectangular tissue box or any other cardboard box, printer paper, stapler OR needle and thread, sharpie, glue or tape (optional), plus any fun decorations (optional)

Journals are used by many people to pull thoughts, feelings, and ideas out of their heads and on to paper! These ideas can be expressed through words, drawings, pictures, and many other creative ways. Here is one way of constructing your very own journal, with limited resources, to use how you would like!

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Instructions:

1. Cut out the bottom of the tissue box so you have a rectangular piece of cardboard.

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2. Fold the cardboard rectangle in half. You’ve created the cover of your new journal!

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3. Fold one piece of printer paper in half (hamburger style), and then in half again (hamburger style). This should create a small booklet of four pages.

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4. Use this folding method for at least four pieces of paper, then stack the booklets of paper together as shown. When stacking, be sure that the sides that open are with each other and closed sides are together as well.

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5. Place the stacked booklets inside the cardboard “cover”. Align the open-sided pages up with the top edge of the cover. The closed sides of the pages should poke out from the bottom of your cover.

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6. Use scissors to cut off the edge of the pages that poke out the bottom of your cover. All of your pages should be able to open left to right, just like a book. Your journal is almost complete!

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7. Using a stapler, staple your journal together along the folded edge of the cardboard. Keep the stapler as close as possible to the fold so that you can maximize the size of your page. (Don’t have a stapler? No problem; you’ll find instructions in a second blog post for using a needle and thread.)

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8. Your personal journal is done! Use whatever materials you’d like to decorate the cover — stickers, glitter, drawings, paint, etc.

Part 2, Create Your Own Journal, Needle and Thread Binding

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Discipline: Social, Emotional, Learning
Age Range: 9-12 (all ages with adult supervision)
Estimated Time: 10 minutes
What you need: Completed journal from Part 1, Create Your Own Journal, plus needle and thread

Journals are used by many people to pull thoughts, feelings, and ideas out of their heads and on to paper! Here’s Part 2 of creating your own journal and now to bind it using a needle and thread if you don’t happen to have a stapler.

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Instructions (alternative to stapling the spine of your journal):

1. Thread a sharp needle on about 12 inches of thread. Tie off the end of the thread with several knots.
2. Open your booklet to the centerfold of all pages. With a sharpie, mark a dot on both sides of the booklet along the fold, about an inch away from the edges of the booklet. (This dot is where your needle and thread will be going through.)

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3. Now, insert your needle through one of the sharpie marks (in through the pages, out through the cover side), so that the knotted end of the thread is on the inside of the booklet.

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4. Next, poke the needle through the back of the booklet (in through the cover, out through the side of the pages), so the needle and thread come back through the second sharpie mark.

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5. Repeat this pattern several times so that you have a thick band of thread along the spine of the booklet.
6. Tie the thread off with several knots near the opposite sharpie hole from the original knot. Tie the knots just as you did with the starting knot.

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Your journal is now complete!

Weathering Scavenger Hunt

Discipline: Earth Science
Age Range: 10-14
Estimated Time: 20 minutes
What you need: Download the Weathering Scavenger Hunt activity sheet and you’ll need an area outdoors with rocks

Instructions:
Have you ever wondered what causes rocks to break?

In science, we have a special word for when rocks get broken down by nature. It is called weathering. Weathering is the natural process of breaking down rocks and minerals into tiny pieces of sediment.

Did you know that there can be other ways that weathering can break down rocks? They are called Freeze-thaw, water, and vegetation.

Can you guess how these three things break down rocks?

Freeze-thaw making rocks crack

Freeze-thaw is when water freezes and pushes against the rock as it expands making the rock crack. You might have seen something like this happen if you ever left a soda pop in the freezer. What happened to the can?

Water breaks down rocks, so they are round and smooth. Have you ever felt a smooth river rock? The force of sediment and the water hitting the rocks over long periods of time makes this happen.

Water breaking down rocks

Vegetation is a special word meaning plants. Can you think of a word that sounds similar to vegetation? Vegetable!  Vegetation can break down rocks in two ways. One way is then plants grow and push against the rocks causing them to crack. Have you ever noticed that tree roots can creak driveways? Pretty strong, right! Plants can also produce a chemical that breaks down the rocks too.

Vegetation pushing against rocks to make them crack

Now that you know the three different ways weathering can break down rocks go outside and see if you can find:
1. One rock weathered by freeze-thaw.
2. One rock weathered by water.
3. One rock weathered by vegetation.

Helpful Hints: More than one type of weathering can break down a rock. You might see rocks that look like both water and vegetation have broken them down. 

New Words:
Weathering: The breaking down of rocks and minerals into sediment.
Freeze-thaw: When water freezes and pushes against the rock making it crack.
Vegetation: Plant life.

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Photo sources:
Freeze-thaw
Water
Vegetation