New Stream Team app makes search for wildlife into a treasure hunt

What do you get if you cross a walk in the park with Pokémon Go?

It’s Nature Sleuths, Stream Team’s new family adventure game — a set of treasure hunts powered by the mobile app GooseChase.

The games — available for 16 Thurston County parks, with more to come — focus on finding animals and animal habitat and are designed to offer people of all ages a fresh way to look at their favorite parks and a reason to visit different ones.

“The main purpose of it is to encourage people to get out and have fun,” said Stream Team’s Michelle Stevie, who came up with the idea for the program. “When we go walking in the woods, a lot of times we’re kind of oblivious to what we’re seeing, but there’s so much going on. … The parks give so much support to urban wildlife. We’re lucky that we have so many parks here.”

“The Nature Sleuths scavenger hunts are great because they’re a guided way to go through a park,” said Sarah Tolle, who helped to create the Nature Sleuths website and has been playing the games with her children, Julianna, 10, and Owen, 7, who are both home schooled.

On Monday, the Tolles explored Woodard Bay Conservation Area, one of their favorite parks.

“The kids had a blast,” Sarah Tolle told The Olympian. “There were three deer that were entertaining us near the trail. They were munching along following us.”

To complete the mission, explorers photograph what they find and submit it to Stream Team for prizes, including a different animal sticker for each adventure.

“I was exploring the app today as I was posting our photo,” Tolle said. “There’s a news feed, so you can see what other people have posted and what they’ve discovered at other parks.”

While they build community in a time of physical distancing, the games weren’t inspired by life in a global pandemic.

“I was thinking about a game like this well over 10 years ago when we didn’t have all of our smart phone technology,” Stevie told The Olympian. “I was thinking about how to get this out there. Making signs is very expensive, and there’s a lot of vandalism to signs, even on trails, so there wasn’t a good way then to create this kind of program.”

And as Pokémon prodigies will know, that means the idea wasn’t inspired by the game that has people walking around town with their eyes glued to their phones. The mobile game launched in 2016.

“Technology caught up with me,” Stevie said.

Nature Sleuths

• What: Enhance your outdoor adventures with Stream Team’s new nature-focused treasure hunts, offered in partnership with the Nisqually Reach Nature Center.
• When: Through October
• Where: Thurston County Parks
• More information: https://streamteam.info/nature-sleuths/
• If you don’t have a mobile device: The games run on the GooseChase app, available free for Android and iOS devices. If you don’t have a mobile device, contact mstevie@cilolympia.wa.us or aprilroe@nisquallyestuary.org.

This story was originally published April 16, 2021 at 5:45 AM.