Bird Banding Day

We visited a local nature center today for a wonderful up close opportunity to observe bird banding. I saw a note in a parenting magazine that mentioned that today was bird banding day. Since we are studying birds for school, I thought I would take a chance and take the kids to this nature center and investigate bird banding. You never know when you chase this kind of activity down...not sure if it is worth the drive and the sacrifice of your "typical" school day. Well...this day was well worth the drive. It was one of our best school days ever. A day that the kids will not forget for a long time.

When we first got to the nature center we found a carolina wren nest with 3 baby birds in it. We also found a snake that was interested in these birds as a meal. No worries...the snaked moved on and let them be.

When we got to the park, we first learned about how the naturalists catch the birds in different traps. Today they were using the mist net trap.This park has a great bird viewing area with different feeders that attract different kinds of birds. We saw american goldfinches, wood peckers and even chipmunks at the feeders.
The park was full of school groups and we were able to listen in on what they were learning at the banding table. The naturalists let us follow them to the traps and look for birds. Here they are getting a bird out of the net.

After taking the bird back to the table they first weigh the bird and start to record their findings. The bird is in a mesh bag while they weigh it.

The next step is to look to see if the bird has been banded before. They are hoping to find birds that have bands. It helps with the research to find banded birds again. Different size birds use different bands. Here they are measuring the birds wing. This helps determine the age of the bird and the sex of the bird.


This is also when they are recording the specific coloring. Here is a female cardinal. The top picture is a white throated sparrow. While we were there they trapped 7 of these.Notice all the different bans on the table (they look like necklaces). This day they banded about 10-15 different kinds of birds, plus trapped many more birds that already had bands.
After all their info is gathered they let the bird go. Tristen was able release a red eyed vireo bird.We finally started nature journals and brought them and recorded some great info. We listed all the birds they banded that day along with lots of different things the girls learned. This was a great nature center (different post...different time). I am so glad we took the chance to check it out.

Our Bird Study

I have been gathering info for this post so it has taken me a little longer to get to it. I mentioned awhile back on a friends blog about a bird coloring book that I printed (a freebie from online) that spurred us on into a whole bird study. My friend Ginny asked for me to post about that bird coloring book (sorry it took so long). It is interesting how homeschooling works sometimes, one thing leads to another and all of the sudden, you find yourself knee deep into a unit study. That is how it turned out for us in our bird study.

During our transition into our new home here, a lot of our school books were packed up and unreachable so we had to improvise on our curriculum. I found a free bird coloring book online (HERE) and thought I would print it and use it for science. I took my printed copy to the print store to make another copy and had it spiral bound for safe keeping.

Each day the girls look up the bird online (HERE) and learn about that particular bird. We look at different pictures, listen to the call/song, notice it's field markings, that kind of stuff. At first, we were doing 2 birds a day, but we weren't retaining much info on each bird. We also save an image of the bird as our desktop background to help reinforce identifying it. This is teaching the girls how to do their own research, how to use google (don't worry, I am right there), and other computer skills.

We have a great yard for bird watching. A few large trees and our home backs up to a big wooded area. It seems to be a wonderful habitat for lots of birds. We wanted to make sure we were well prepared for bird watching right here at home. We always have a our new "kid friendly" field guide, binoculars and log sitting on the window sill waiting to be used.
We are keeping a log of the different birds that we are able to identify in our own yard. Just this morning we saw a tufted titmouse on the deck (HERE). If we hadn't been learning about birds, we would not have been able to identify it so quickly and accurately.

We have also gone on bird watching hikes in the yard and surrounding woods. That was a great outing (just out the back door). The girls loved gathering their supplies for the hike and we spent a beautiful spring afternoon soaking up God's creation.

We work as a team to identify a bird while we are watching. One is observing and describing and the other one is looking it up in the field guide.I love this kind of hands on learning. It is amazing how much info that the kids can learn when we aren't busy doing workbooks for school. Soon I will post all about our owl pellet dissection.