Haines kids are getting a good look at the world around them.
On a beautiful crisp afternoon, half a dozen children are meandering along the trail at Jones point. They stumble and squeal and wonder at their surroundings.
This is the Animal Tracking Club, a free after school program offered by the Takshanuk watershed council and the Chilkoot Indian Association. For the second year in a row, every Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, rain or shine or snow, up to fifteen kids from kindergarten and up have been wandering local trails in search of animal signs.
Organizer Tracy Wirak-Cassidy explains:
“ Sometimes it’s nibbled on branches, or pine cones squirrels have been feeding on, sometimes we’ll find feathers, so it’s just taking a deeper look at our surroundings, and trying to figure out what the animals are doing.”
“I think it was a moose, because there was marks on it”
They look for tracks, and set up game cameras. Sometimes they make a cast of the imprints, as Finn Mc Mahan explains.
“So you put water and mix it with a cast powder, and it forms kind of like a cement, and you pour it in and let it dry overnight.”
And along the way they learn the Tlingit word for various animals.
“So do we think it’s a Eets or a Hoots?
What’s a Hoots?
Brown bear
I think it’s a Hoots! ”
“So we are trying to incorporate the Tlingit animal names, we are all learning, we are using the SEAlaska institute app that has animal names, so we’ll practice that in the classroom, and we come out and we try to use the animal names in Tlingit”
Here, Oliver Billings practices
“(Tlingit word)”
It’s a healthy, cheerful way for the kids to spend time together outside, and the weather won’t stop them.
“ Last year we started in mid November, when it was really snowy, and we still went outside every day and it was dark, so we had headlamps, i put reflective lights and vests on everybody, and we’d still tromp around in the snow, and the snow is actually a great time to find tracks”
