Week 7: CO Carnivores

This week we sharpened our senses in this camp on predators and their prey. We discovered who eats whom in our city and learned what adaptations, from stalking to ambushing, help carnivores find their dinner.

We welcomed the heat this Monday, and dug into learning about some carnivorous insects. Ladybugs, mantids, and dragonflies are great predators that we can see here in our park. They out compete the heat and other predators with their amazing adaptations. We got to see lots of these critters down by the river along with our favorites like crawdads and clams.

On Tuesday we slithered into the world of herptiles, or herps, which are our amphibian and reptile friends. They all have many things in common like being born from eggs, living on land and in water, and being carnivorous. They are often found along rivers like the South Platte and are crucial to ecosystems. We leaped like frogs into understanding more about them and then again to the river to search for them at Critter Crawl

This Wednesday we were visited by our special guests from Nature’s Educators who brought with them some really rad raptors. These carnivorous birds are powerful and neat in so many ways, and getting to see them upclose was a great way to better learn about their adaptations that help them survive in some extreme environments. 

For field day on Thursday we jumped around like the big cats and dogs of Colorado. We slipped into the paws of some mountain lions, lynx, coyotes, and wolves to learn how they survive the intense landscape of Colorado. Towards the end of the day we explored all together in the river to investigate the food chain of the river ecosystem.

On Friday we cooled off the week by learning about how some more common prey animals escape their ferocious, carnivorous predators by playing some fun escape games, uncovering the solutions to a mystery, and exploring in the river. Then, to cap off the week we celebrated each camper’s inner predator at graduation and then had some fun in the sprinklers.