Birds of Winter
Wintertime is an excellent time to become a little more familiar with the birds. Whether it’s observing ones that frequent your backyard or enjoying bird watching at local parks, birds are consistently available in nature to study with your children. What makes the winter time a great time is the fact that natural food sources for birds are running low forcing them out into the open more frequently. We as a family do a few things during the winter months to enjoy the birds.
As often as possible, we visit local parks and focus in on a couple of things. We look for abandoned nests which can usually easily be found. We like to guess what species of bird may have inhabited that nest back in the spring and summer.
Abandoned Nest
Also we always spend time at the ponds and lakes at the parks because we can almost always find water birds there.
Mallard Ducks
A tradition for our family is to also put out bird feeders during the winter. This time of year the birds are so thankful that we do and it’s simply amazing the amount and types of birds that we will get to visit. There are all sorts of neat learning activities to do with your children involving bird feeder keeping and watching. We make a point to try to keep a variety of bird seed in order to draw a larger range of species, such as black oil sunflower, thistle/nyger and safflower seed. And we put out fresh fruit sometimes and make homemade suet in order to bring the beautiful woodpeckers into view often. Keeping bird feeders is a little bit of work, but I’ve always felt it was well worth the effort.
Tufted Titmouse and Carolina Wren
Carolina Chickadee and Tufted Titmouse
Ideas such as the above and many, many more can be found in our Beautiful Birds unit study. Along with several notebooking pages that can be used while watching birds in your backyard and at your feeders.
A book resource that I highly recommend for this time of year is Backyard Birds of Winter by Carol Lerner.
Comments