White Pine trees and secrets of scat

The first class in January was on a very cold day, so we were outside for just a short time.  (Our hand-warmers kept our hands toasty again.)  We found a large white pine tree beside Newman School.  W-H-I-T-E has 5 letters and there are 5 needles in each needle packet (needles stuck together at one end) of a white pine tree.  We each stood with our backs against the trunk and then counted our steps outward until we were under the outer edge of the lowest branches.  Then we continued walking that same number of steps 3 more times away from the tree.  When we all stopped, we saw that we had created a big circle around the tree:  this is as far as the roots of a white pine tree spread!

We also learned that you can tell the age of a living white pine tree by counting its whorls of branches that are separated by the parts of the trunk without branches.

Back inside the science center, we had hot chocolate and then we examined the coyote scat that we found and our instructor collected from our last walk in December.  ("Scat" is another name for wild animals' droppings.)  She had taken it home, dried it for 3 weeks and then pulled it apart.  Inside were lots of bones, so she sealed them inside of covered petri dishes, and put all of the fur in a sealed bag.  We examined these under microscopes and hand lenses.  Before the scat was pulled apart, it was 5 inches long and dark gray with bits of bones on the outside.  It turns out that inside were 3 skulls, many bones and lots of gray fur.  There were no seeds, fruits or grasses.  We were able to see the teeth in the skulls pretty well and noticed that 2 skulls had teeth that looked like they belonged to a carnivore - sharp and jagged - and 1 skull had teeth that were taller and flatter.  Our instructor gave us diagrams of bones.  Here's what this coyote ate:  2 short-tailed shrews and 1 vole.

Here's a poem about scat that was found online:*

It starts with an "S" and it ends with "T"
It comes out of you and it comes out of me.
I know what you're thinking, but, don't say that.
The scientific word for that is scat.

You're walking through the woods and your nose goes "ooh."
You know some animal's laid scat near you.
It may seem gross, well that's O.K.
They don't have toilets to flush it away.
Now don't go screamin' and lose your lunch
If you picked it apart you could learn a bunch.

If you wanna found out what animals eat,
Take a good look at what they excrete.
Inside of their scat are all kinds of clues,
Parts of food their bodies can't use.

It tells us what they eat and it tells us who they are
That's what we know about scat so far.
If you wanna find out what animals are around,
The place to start looking is the scat on the ground.

*slightly abridged from "Scat Rap" written by Rodd Pemble, Mary Keebler and Andy Bennett, Great Smoky Mountain Institute.  Word adaptation and music by Peter Moore and Tom Ernst.