Wildcat Hills Nature Center offers unique education to local residents

A little over halfway between Kimball and Scottsbluff there sits The Wildcat Hills Nature Center. It's an educational center that showcases the wildlife of the local area.

Wildcat Hills is often a destination for school field trips. According to Amanda Filipi mostly first second and third graders visit with their schools.

The center has a classroom that allows Filipi to talk to the children about the wildlife of Nebraska. She also uses the time in the classroom to talk to the kids about safety when they finally go out on their hike.

"I tell them how to act if we were to encounter a mountain lion, although I never have with any of the groups, I tell them so they're prepared. Although most of them are just excited to see a regular bunny rabbit," Filipi said.

She usually take the kids on a short hike and points out the things in the wild that they talked about in the classroom, such as plants, bird nests, and the signs of wildlife.

"A lot of them want to just go on the trails and do a hike and then we'll do a brief lesson about habitats or adaptations or something like that and they they go and explore the basement where most of our good stuff is," Filipi said.

One of the things that was most exciting for Filipi to share was the current display they have at the center that has been traveling around the state. A collection of pictures, animal skins, and bones all meant to educate kids about their local environment.

"Right now we have a display that has been traveling around the state, before it was here it was at the Lincoln Children's Museum for about three months. We'll have this display until March sometime. It was built by the Nebraska Game and Parks Legacy Project and then funds were provided by the Nebraska Environmental Trust to put this together. So what it does is it showcases Nebraska's wide diversity of what we have across the state and see what the state has to offer concerning wildlife," Filipi said.

She said that they look for displays and try to keep an ear out for displays that might match up with their purpose and mission statement.

"We haven't recently been asking for too many displays because the current room that we have doesn't support some of the bigger displays that we would want. Some of the other displays we would look into getting, especially if we got additional space were ones having to do with paleontology some other roaming ones and spice it up. Some of the displays have to stay, but we try to make sure that it is fun and unique," Filipi said.

Filipi is interested in getting different displays in order to attract more people and help teach anyone about their local environment and wildlife. She mentioned that the nature center tends to be the favorite part of Wildcat Hills for most of the visitors.

"We get a lot of people that travel through that say 'I always see the building but I've never stopped,' and stopping by finally gives them a chance to explore what we have in our area. Both with habitat and animals and really gives people a sense of place. We also get a lot of people that come out to go hiking and then they stop in at the nature center and it ends up being their favorite part. They think it's really cool," Filipi said.

There are plenty of things to do and see at Wildcat Hills. The Nature Center alone has plenty of activities for children. They also have some animal mounts on display so that visitors can see the local wildlife up close in a safe capacity. There is a contained bee colony that visitors can get up close to and examine, as well as turtles and fish to watch. The display of mounts include bobcats, a mountain lion, deer, elk, several types of birds, and other animals. Some of the mounts require the nature center to fill out a yearly permit due to the circumstances by which they were originally acquired,

Surrounding the nature center are campgrounds and miles of trails.

"We have about four or five primitive camp grounds several big stone picnic shelters. We have about three and a half miles of trails and they are all hike, bike and horse back ride friendly. We get a lot of people to hike and our campground is very rarely full. It does require a Nebraska state park sticker," Filipi said.

The Wildcat Hills Nature center isn't merely a school field trip location. It is an interesting place to learn about western Nebraska wildlife.

"It's a really great place for people to just come and learn about what's in their backyard," Filipi said.