Wildlife Safari

At stations where biofacts are included, questions will relate to information directly from the field guide.  Physical biofacts such as scat or skull replicas will resemble the drawings, photos, or information in the field guide very closely.  Photos may not all be directly from the guide.

The field guides are readily available online for purchase.  

Quiet talking between team members is allowed at the stations.

Each team is given one ZipGrade form for the test.  See an example posted elsewhere on this webpage.  In addition, it will be pre-printed with the appropriate school name and team number.

For the 2023 season (Mammals) the answer is YES!

Questions are worth 1-4 points based on difficulty. In the event of a tie, tie-breakers are determined by the number of difficult questions answered correctly.

Your team is allowed up to 2 reference sources, one per student.

If your team is using a purchased field guide, that qualifies as one reference. 

Student-created field guides are also allowed.  If your team has used a purchased field guide as part of that, remember there must be no loose pages.  That document would also count as one field guide.

You may have two purchased guides, two student-created guides, or one of each.

Yes.  Students are able to alter their field guide in the way they will best utilize it to identify species and locate information.  An added index must be attached.  There should be no loose pages.

No.  The only restriction is that there may be no loose pages.

Because time is limited at each station, students should be very familiar with the content of their study guide. 

Yes.

A team of two students is allowed to bring one field guide per student.  Accordingly, a team of two students could bring the purchased field guide as one of them, and create their own field guide with a different indexing system as the 2nd field guide.  Or they could create an alternate index, and make certain that it is securely fastened to the purchased field guide.

The rules do not specify a size limit.  Remember that it cannot have loose pages.  There is probably a practical limit on how big it can be or should be.