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Wednesday, March 17, 2010
March nature studies: Birds Part 1
Sorry! Long time no blog! We have been working really hard and enjoying the lovely weather so that's my excuse :)
Anyway, one thing we are doing is getting into our nature study in a BIG way. I have a beautiful set of old nature books (a wonderful, British, alternative to the Handbook of Nature Study), called The Teacher's Book of Nature Study. They were published by Evans Bros, London and you can pick them up on Ebay fairly regularly. I'm pretty sure they are out of copyright now but I'm going to check further before I start scanning any pages to put on my blog but if you can get them they are well worth it because they are full of lovely drawings, poems, facts and experiments.
In the front of one volume are all the topics covered in all three books divided up over the months of the year so that you can plan your work. We are taking one or two topics a month to study - this month we're doing germination and I shall cover that in another post.
In addition to our work from the book, we ALWAYS do lots of bird study and that is going to be the topic of this and the next post :) I'm going to share with you a couple of lovely, hands on projects you can do with your kids that we ourselves our working on at the moment.
The first is a bird nest map - perfect for this time of the year :)
Basically, you need to be able to observe a fixed area on a regular basis whether it's your garden, a relatives garden or a small area of local woodland or park. You need to be able to spend time really just watching and listening and noticing the different birds because what you are going to do is work out where they are nesting! We've been doing this in our back garden - it started with a pigeon that we noticed continually going backwards and fowards to one particular tree. Then we noticed that it was carrying bits of twig and leaves and then, finally, we spotted where he was going - into a bush next to the tree! There could be no doubt that he was nest building in there!
We've been doing this now with other birds and, so far, have three definate nest sites in our garden and one possible. We have nests of pigeons, blackbirds and blue tits :)
So, we decided it would be fun to draw a map of our back garden and plot the different birds nest sites over the course of the spring. Here are the ones the kids have done (I have too but it's not here!) - Rosie's first and then April's (you'll notice Rosie's is from a slight different angle):
Apart from building observation skills and the sheer pleasure of watching these busy, hard working birds there are 3 great things that will arise from this project:
- We can keep watch of specific nest sites to look out for fledging chicks - so cute!
- We can go back in the autumn and use the map to locate the now empty nests to investigate them.
- We can date the backs of the maps and continue to keep maps over the next few years and compare them to see if birds used the same nest sites.
Hope you enjoy it! The second bird activity will be tomorrow :)
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