Birding 101: Birding by Ear

When we started bird watching, I thought being able to distinguish between bird songs was some kind of special ability that only truly gifted naturalists possessed.  I never imagined that the boys and I would be able to quickly and easily identify a long list of birds just by hearing their songs/calls.

Birding by ear took birding to a whole new level for us, and I highly recommend you take some time to listen to recordings and do memory work indoors so that you can have greater success while outdoors.  It's a lot more fun than it sounds.

Mnemonics have helped us greatly, and over at Olive Plants, I published a little piece about it last year.  Rather than write a new post, I'll just link you to it.  Fly on over to get a list of our favorite mnemonics and other birding by ear resources!

Though slow-going, this series is not dead!  Subscribe or follow so you won't miss any of our future posts on how to teach your kids to use a field guide, write bird stories, keep a birding journal and life list, and much more!

Consider keeping a journal of the birds you hear or see this month and Tweet and See with Heather.  You can link in with other bird enthusiasts on the last day of each month.  I really enjoy reading the reports of birders from Georgia to Washington.  Maybe one day we'll be able to read reports from around the world!

Until we tweet again....
Dawn

Birds' Eye View

The Olive Plant boys,

a.ka. Orville and Wilbur,

completed a science fair project

about bird feeders.

If you are interested in reading about their project

and which color feeder attracted the most birds

in their experiment,

fly on over to Olive Plants!

Science Fair 2011
Birds' Eye View
by Orville and Wilbur

Watch Live Baby Eagles

In Iowa, there are 3 baby eagles about to be hatched.  You can watch it live here.  Every little while Mama bird gets up and readjusts her or the eggs.  They are supposed to be hatching within the next 24 hours. 

Disclaimer:  This is addictive. 

Heather

Birding 101: Sketching Birds

Once the boys learned the basics, mastered binocular usage, and found their friend, the camera, they caught the birding bug BIG TIME!

Bird watching was something we did wherever we went...while eating a picnic lunch, while waiting in line at the drive-thru, even while riding in the car!

And birds started showing up all around my house in the form of art work!  Around here, getting a sketch of a ruby-throated hummingbird means you are really loved!!

It was not long until our classroom turned into a bird-printing studio, and there is just so much room on the fridge for these kinds of pictures.  And ALL of the pictures had to be displayed as not to hurt any one's feelings (or as the boys pointed out, the birds' feelings were fragile, too).

So I bought each boy a spiral art journal and kept them on a desk under the classroom window.  I had the desk stocked with colored pencils, a sharpener, regular no. 2 pencils, and erasers.  From this spot they could easily see our feeders and keep a log of many of the birds that visited us each day.

They drew pictures of which birds they identified
in the time they watched
and labeled each bird.
I also had them write a short sentence
about each scene.

Sometimes they would notice other birds
at places other than the feeder.
Their journal page had to depict
where the birds were seen.

Sometimes they saw birds in trees.
Notice they noted details like seeing two nests.

Other times birds would show up at interesting locations
like on my car.
This particular female cardinal
hovered around my car's side mirrors
all day!
We called her our pet bird!!

Carolina wrens nested behind our shed,
and we would see them hopping
around it all day.

In this entry, Wilbur drew a black vulture,
but he also wrote a list of the other birds
he saw that day.
He also included "honk, honk"
because he heard a Canada Goose
but did not see it.

On this page,
Orville did a good job sketching
the Downy's behavior.
He also included the date
of his entry.

On some pages of their journals,
the boys made notes of
mnemonics they used to memorize
birds songs.

Orville shares three of his favorite birds and their mnemonics
on this page.
The Hooded Warbler says, "I've a little, pretty hood."
The Killdeer says, "Hot Pockets."
The Red-winged Black Bird says, "Oh my red wing!"

Wilbur wants everyone to know
that the Indigo Bunting says,
"I am Mommy's favorite bird,
yes, I am!"
I will write more about mnemonics
in a future post.

We also included other "special" pages...

...like graphs of how many of each bird
were seen over a set period of time.

and instructional pages
like the one pictured above that Wilbur drew
to show the differences between
an American Crow and a Raven.

It seemed that drawing birds increased the boys love

for the great outdoors and for their feathered friends.

Their abilities as artists grew, too.

Two years later,
Wilbur painted this Ruby-throated Hummingbird
and won 4th place in a Crayola contest!

They loved these assignments, too!

Don't just take my word on that.

You can read what Orville has to say about sketching birds here

and what Wilbur thinks here!

Want to get started

Drawing with Your Children-

Nature Style?

Join B4L's very own Heather

for a weekly meme!

Barb, the Harmony Art Mom, has compiled a great set of lesson plans to be used with the book Drawing with Children.  This book follows a teaching structure very similar to the one I used with my boys when completing the journals pictured in this post.  I highly recommend it to you!  Her plans will tie in with Heather's meme, too, so your children will have a format for sharing their work.  I hope you will join the sketching and nature fun!



Join me next time when I will tweet about the mnemonics I mentioned earlier in this post!

Until we tweet again...
Dawn

Birding 101: The camera is your friend.

In our early days of bird watching,

we played games to learn to use binoculars with ease.

However, birds are movers and shakers!  We do not always get the time to watch a bird for as long as we need to make an accurate identification.

Sometimes, even when we get a good, long look at a bird, there still is not enough time to take in all the details.  The differences between some birds, particularly sparrows, are minute and challenge even seasoned bird watchers.

Can you tell which birds are at this feeder?

It did not take long for me to realize that the camera is our friend!

While the boys would look through binocs, I would look through the lens of my camera and snap as many shots as possible.  If time allowed, I would switch to the video camera and record the bird in action.  This allowed us to notice more about the bird's movements and habitat, an important part of nature study.

Even if you can't get in close enough with your camera
to get a crystal-clear view...

...you can zoom in even closer
with your photo editor,
giving you the view you need
to make a positive i.d.

At the end of each birding outing, we would sit down in a shady spot or return home and look through my photo journal of the day.  It was very  easy to notice details in the photos and match our pictures to the pictures in our field guides.

The best part was that the birds we identified this way became cemented in our visual memories.  Soon we could identify a large number of birds without the assistance of a field guide.  We often double check, just to be sure!  However, the camera has been our best teacher.

You can email pictures of birds
to birding friends for confirmation, too.
Two heads are always better than one.
Heather and I regularly email pictures to each other.
At least I do, when I have a working camera!
I borrowed all the pictures in this post from her.
Thanks Heather!

After the boys had seen several close-up shots of all those pretty bird details, they wanted to create sketches of their own!  Next time I will tweet about how we incorporated bird sketching into our school day!

Until we tweet again...

Dawn, for the Olive Plants

Birding 101: Using Binoculars

After the boys gained a little knowledge and experienced the fun of identifying the birds which are common to our region, they needed training on how to use binoculars.

Using binocs was challenging for both boys at first but particularly for Orville.  He is legally blind in one eye and wears progressive bifocals.  He cannot see anything more than a distorted, fuzzy jumble of colors without his glasses, and he found using binocs to be very challenging, particularly inexpensive beginner binocs.

I am forever thankful for my friend Molly who did some research and found these Leupold binoculars with lens pieces that easily twist into place for use with glasses.



You don't necessarily need a $100 pair of binoculars for every child in your family who wants to bird watch and whether or not a child is ready to properly care for an expensive piece of equipment has to be determined by each family.  However, I do recommend that you ditch the inexpensive beginner binocs as soon as you can.  At least have one pair of good binocs that can be shared.  It really enhances the bird watching experience and alleviates frustration when trying to identify a new bird.

Once we found binoculars that worked for us, there was still some training to be done.  It takes practice to be able to find a bird and bring it in to focus. 

We use these steps:

1. Find the bird without binoculars first. 
2. Take note of any features of its surroundings that might help you find it if you "lose your place", like clumps of leaves or a curve in the tree.
3. Once the bird is in your line of sight, move the binoculars to your eyes without moving your head.
4. If you do not immediately see the bird, move your binoculars slowly and with small movements to the left, then to the right, then up, then down, until you find it.  Look for your "landmark" along the way.
5. Once you find the bird, use your dominate pointer finger to adjust the focus knob until you have a clear view.

Sounds easy, right?  Not really.  And it takes practice.  Here are a few fun activities we did to gain experience....



Hide Easter eggs around your backyard or at a local playground.

Place them in a variety of locations, some easy to spot...

...and others a little more difficult.

Have your children find them using their binoculars
and describe the color of egg and its location
 to a sibling, friend or you.

You can make this game as easy or difficult as you like, increasing the difficulty as your children's skills advance.  Eventually, I drew stripes, dots and other "field marks" onto our eggs so that the boys would learn to take notice of more than one attribute.  Other times, I would hide several eggs but pick a "golden egg".  They had to meet the challenge of finding the blue egg with green dots and purple stripes, for example.

We also went to this spot,
one of the most beautiful look-outs in our state,
to play a game of I Spy.

Each of us would take turns saying,
"I spy with my little BI-noculars
a white roof."
Do you see the barn with the white roof, too?
It is easy to find with binocs!

Soon they would play without me.
It was a fun brother game
in which they were very motivated
to challenge each other!

Even though these games increased their binocular-using skills, sometimes binoculars just weren't enough.  Join me next time when I will tweet about cameras!  They are a bird watcher's friend!

Until we tweet again...
Dawn

Birding 101: Know Your Parts

So now that you know us Olive Plants a little better, it's time to get to know your parts better...your birding parts, that is!

Our first birding outing was hysterical. 

At least thinking back on it is hysterical.  At the time, it was exhausting and frustrating.

I loaded down the boys, ages 5 and 6 at the time, with all the "necessary" gear.  Each carried his own binoculars, a field guide, the Les Beletsky Bird Songs book, an Identiflyer and a backpack containing a journal, colored pencils, snacks and water.  We were ready to do some serious bird watching! 

As you can imagine, within minutes they were hot and tired and couldn't find many birds.  When they did see a bird, by the time they could get the binoculars to their eyes and start to focus, it had flown away.  Or if they got a good view of the bird, they would forget what it looked like as they flipped through the field guide.  And trying to scroll through all those bird calls and songs in the Beletsky book was FRUSTRATING! 

I wondered if they were too young or if birding wasn't something they really wanted to do.  However, within a few weeks we went back to the same spot, and they were fully engaged and loving every minute of bird watching.  What made the difference?  I think it was a change I made in our approach.

Instead of jumping in feet first, we took some time to build our knowledge.  We began by learning the parts of a bird.



The resource we found most helpful was Jeannie Fulbright's Flying Creatures of the Fifth Day (Apologia).  This is a great science course for the elementary years and gave my boys the basic knowledge I was seeking for them.  She writes in a way that kids can easily understand but does not water-down the content.  Soon we were able to discuss birds in a very specific way.

This bird has a yellow rump.


This bird has black and white wing bars.


This bird has a curved beak.

Having a well-developed birding vocabulary helped my boys to quickly recognize and retain what they would see while bird watching and be able to communicate that information to other members of their bird watching team.  You may not be preparing to bird competitively, but it is still fun to bird watch as a group and important to be able to tell your birding friends what you have seen.  This knowledge also helps birders navigate their field guides much more quickly (but more on that another day!).

We also completed Notebooking Page's Nature Study- Birds, the complete set.  These pages allowed us to create our own "field guide". 

I selected 3-5 birds per week for us to study.  We read about the birds of the week in our real field guides and examined each bird's shape, size, color, bill shape and size, silhouette, and field marks very closely.  Then the boys completed the notebooking page for each bird, paying particular attention to coloring with detail.  Of course, young children are not going to color with complete accuracy but I encouraged them to make their picture as realistic as possible and praised them for including details like eye stripes or wing bars, even if they weren't spot on.

The Notebooking pages
allow children to color accurate representations
of the birds to be learned
and to learn important birding skills
such as reading a range map.

Once the pages for the week were completed, we kept our eyes peeled for those birds.  I set up feeders close to our school room windows so we could easily watch for them to show up throughout the day.  We went for a daily walk around our neighborhood where there are a lot of houses with multiple feeders.  We visited a local birding hot spot at least once per week.  I made sure the first 20-something birds they learned were very common birds which they would be sure to see regularly.  Success came quickly and enthusiasm grew!

During this stage of learning, when we did venture out into the field, I carried the only pair of binoculars and one field guide.  We did not try to journal or take pictures.  We only identified what we had studied.  I wasn't trying to stifle their curiosity but build interest while alleviating frustration.  Within a few weeks, they were ready to discover more.  They were noticing birds besides the common ones they knew and were eager to identify them, too.     

That's when we took the next step and I taught them how to use their very own binoculars.  I will tweet more about that next time!

Until we tweet again...
Dawn, for the Olive Plants

Disclosure: I am an affliliate for amazon.com and notebookingpages.com.  If you make a purchase from either site after following the links provided in this post, I will receive a commission.  I have not been otherwise compensated for writing this post and have provided my honest evaluation of each product.

How It All Began: The Olive Plants' Story

I used to have absolutely no interest in the great outdoors. In my opinion, outside was just a place to get bug bites and allergy attacks. I could never understand why people stood around under trees peering upward through binoculars until they gave themselves a crick in the neck.

Then I went to a homeschool support group meeting and everything changed.

We had lived in our new hometown for almost two years but we had dragged our feet in becoming active members of the community again. There were painful circumstances surrounding our move, and it took me some time to feel like being a contributing member of society again.

A lady named Molly (you may know her as the Counter-cultural Mom) spoke that night about a birding competition. One of her sons wanted to enter and needed a teammate. She was also considering entering her next youngest son who would also need a birding buddy. My boys were the perfect ages to partner with hers, and the four boys had already met at church and hit it off.

My boys really needed friends at the time. Here’s where I could rehash hard feelings and tell a big blubbery tale but will instead let it suffice to say that the boys had been hurt before our move, too, and really needed good friends.

As Molly spoke that night, I didn’t really comprehend what she was saying concerning bird watching or a competition. I just heard “teammates” and knew that would require my boys spending time with her boys and wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to develop an already budding friendship. After the meeting, I eagerly volunteered us as their teammates.

The next day I realized what I had done.

I had made a commitment to go bird watching!

BIRD WATCHING!!

And competitively at that!

I barely knew what a robin was. How was I going to teach my children to identify enough birds to be competent teammates?

Fortunately, Molly, whom I call the Queen of Resourcefulness, set me up with several great books, field guides and audio collections. She helped us find binoculars that Orville, who is legally blind in one eye and wears progressive bifocals, could use. She introduced us to Audubon birds, too. Boy, did that change our lives.

We also started a weekly bird watching club for the boys and alternated teaching responsibilities. That's when I caught the birding bug. As I prepared fun ways for the boys to memorize calls, to learn how to use binoculars, to practice using a field guide and to get outside to find birds, I finally understood exactly why people stand under trees peering upward.

Please don't read too much into this, but I did a lot of healing while bird watching. I could not have recovered from painful events without the Word of God, prayer, worship, Christian counseling…but I needed that time with good friends and a good hobby, too.

It was comforting to spend time with the Counter-cultural boys and their sweet mom, Molly, just being friends and doing something we all loved. Each time we saw a new bird, the excitement of it was a salve to my soul. Reminders of God's greatness and goodness were all around us, and every time He sent a bird our way, it was a reminder that His eye is on me, that He loves me, and that He wisely governs all things, even minor details like where little birds fly and perch.

In months to come, I am going to share some of the lessons I developed to teach the boys during those early days of birding. I praise God for His unwavering faithfulness to me and for blessing me with teaching ideas and I look forward to what He has in store for me in this new venture.

Until we tweet again...
Dawn, for the Olive Plants