Schoolyard Wildlife Program: Introduction
The Schoolyard Wildlife Program is Wild By Design's answer to a school based wildlife conservation initative. It was formulated in 2007, and a pilot program involving three school was conducted in 2008. While conducting the initial project search, we realized that some of the biggest conservationists today were exposed to natural environments as children by either a teacher or a parent. The love they developed for these spaces and the wildlife they harbored led these people to becoming guardians of nature and wildlife later in life.
It was also noticed that most students come from urban environments and have little or no exposure or interaction with the natural world. Could we offer this to students on a continuous basis within the school campus? A further search for such a program brought us to the “Schoolyard Habitat Project” by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services.
Using the project guide developed by them, we set out to develop an Indian idiom of the program that could be conducted in the schools in India. While developing the program for India, special circumstances in the schools in India had to be taken into account. One of the primary factors that prove to be difficult is the teacher student ratio in most Indian schools, which is in the range of 1: 65, making it very difficult to implement activity based teaching. The other factor was gathering wildlife and habitat specific information related to Indian environments.
The initial pilot plan was to develop three or four wildlife sites at various schools as an educational experiment, to understand the challenges and essentials for successful implementation of the program. For this, schools can be requested to assign an area of about 600sq meters, where a wildlife habitat could be developed.
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