Bunny Restaurant

One of our most exciting projects in kindergarten is the creation and monitoring of Bunny Restaurants in our school forest. Each kindergarten class creates a "restaurant" for our local populations of showshoe hares by cutting and piling young aspen trees. Hares LOVE the bark from these trees as a winter food source. Once we put a bunch of the cut saplings in the same place, we increase the local density of the food and shelter components of their habitat. Over the winter, our kindergarteners conduct weekly observations of these sites; counting the nibbles, bites, tracks and scat on and around the bunny restaurant, we can monitor the hare activity in our woods, compare the activity between different habitats, and even see trail cam pictures of our hares as they are visiting their restaurants. As we study these sites, we log our observations on data sheets included in our nature journal as one of the first forays into science observations and experiments at NSCS!