This semester, we are focusing on birds for our nature studies. We've been reading the Burgess Bird book and several books by Arthur Scott Bailey. We've kept chickens and studied them. We've made a bird feeder and have been keeping a list of birds we see in our nature journals. Now, we are ready to go up a notch!
Tuesday, we went to Prairie Ridge Ecostation to count birds with a naturalist. We learned some birds songs and how to identify some birds. We found new birds to add to our list. After an hour of walking around the preserve, we had identified 13 species. That's not to bad considering it was 48 degrees with 20 mph winds. Harrison was first to spot the Carolina chickadee and Melissa found the turkey vultures and mourning doves. I found a scarlet tanager and a downy woodpecker. We also saw a tufted titmouse, an American goldfinch, a white breasted nuthatch, several house finches and white throated sparrows, an eastern towhee and lots of cardinals and robins.
After our mini expedition, we entered the data into E-bird. E-bird is a citizen science project created by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and National Audubon Society. Here you can input the kinds and numbers of birds you observed. It can be from a long walk at a preserve, a hike on nature trail, or just what birds you see from your window at home. Scientists then use that data to observe migration patterns, distribution patterns, etc.
In e-bird, you can pull up maps of recent sitings of various birds, look at the migration habits of birds to see when you are most likely to see a bird. We had a lot of fun exploring the various graphs and charts available.
*Photo by Thomas O'Neill
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