Shining Dawn Books » Beautiful Birds Activities

Build Your Own Bird Blind

Cindy — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 16:11:39 +0000

In our Animal Signs NaturExplorers study, we make a suggestion to build a secret hiding place in which to observe animals without them observing you. Rosina from Rosy ~ Posy, and her children, spent some time recently making an indoor bird blind. We loved the idea so much that we asked if she would mind guest posting her idea here. And she graciously agreed! Not only would her idea make a good all-season observation blind, but it could be used similarly outdoors during decent weather.

Rosina and her husband Len have been homeschooling their three children ages 11, 6 and 4 for the past seven years. Their goal is to instill a life long love of learning in each of them through living books, exploration and imagination. Rosina is an enthusiastic home educator & nature lover that enjoys sharing creative projects, ideas and more. You can visit her at www.rosinahuber.blogspot.com.

“Anyone who has met our family will know that we are without a doubt crazy about nature! One of my children’s favourite hobbies is to watch the birds that come and visit our feeders throughout the year. So what sort of craft do you make to keep a couple of bird brained nature lovers happy? Why you construct a simple bird blind of course for hours and hours of bird watching fun that keeps you up close and personal while incognito.

You will need:
A large cardboard box
A small cardboard box
Masking tape or clear packing tape
Exacto knife
Scissors
A glass
Brads

Start by finding the largest cardboard box that you can. A great place to get a box if you don’t have one handy at home is by visiting your local grocery store and asking if they have a banana box or another large box hanging around in their stock room that they could spare. Quite often I have gone asking for boxes for school projects and I’ve never been turned down yet. Once you have your box, carefully open the top and bottom flaps and then cut vertically down one of the side seams so that the whole thing lies flat on the floor, then cut the box in half and stack the one layer above the other creating a large square. Now grab your tape and tape up the center seam where you are joining the two box halves together on both sides of the cardboard and any other spots on the box that appear to be weak. It may take a couple of strips of tape layered side by side until you have a good six inch width of tape to create a nice sturdy seam that is going to stand up straight when you set your cardboard upright.

Now that you have the backbone of your bird blind built you will want to put in some viewing holes. Place your bird blind on the window sill where it will be used for bird watching and have each of your children stand right in front of it so that you can mark exactly where their eyes meet the cardboard. Take a glass and use it as your template for drawing nice uniform circles. Using your exacto knife carefully cut out the circles slightly within the lines.

With a rambunctious four year old that wants to be just like big brother and sister I thought it was pertinent to create a way to cover up some of the viewing holes while they weren’t in use to keep him from startling the birds as he bounced around behind the blind. To do this we used a smaller cardboard cereal box and using our glass again we traced out more circles to be cut out as covers for our viewing holes.

Using the tip of your scissors poke a hole above each of your viewing holes on your bird blind and through the top of each of the viewing hole covers. Then place a brad through each of the covers and in turn through the holes on your bird blind creating little flaps that swing open and closed over your viewing holes.

We had fun drawing on ours so that they looked like eyes looking back at us. We also thought it would be neat to use our bird blind as a bulletin board (see very first photo) for our nature drawings as well. So we taped up a bunch of our bird drawings from out of our nature journals and photos from bird articles in our local newspapers so that the we could try and spot different species as we watched our feeders. The entire project from start to finish took us about an hour to complete and it is amazing to be able to sit less than a foot away from the feeders watching unnoticed as the birds munch away on their bird seed. Don’t be afraid to get creative with your bird blind either. Take it outdoors on a nice day and have your children cover it with branches and leaves to really camouflage it or let them paint it to blend into the surrounding shrubbery. Set it up near a place you know the birds always gather at, bring along a couple of lawn chairs and some snacks and have fun!

If you decide to make one let me know. We’d love see how you make your bird blind special :)”

Thank you, Rosina! You can find her original post here.

Come Visit Us!

Cindy — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 18:30:46 +0000

If any of you will be at the Home For His Glory Homeschool Fair and Book Swap in Louisville Friday, be sure to look for the Shining Dawn Books booth. We’ll be there! We’re giving away two of our NaturExplorers units in a door prize, too, so be sure to have your card stamped while you’re visiting!

Those of you who read my personal blog, Our Journey Westward, may remember my post about killdeer eggs found in our vegetable garden last year. Well, this is another year with another nest of killdeer eggs. It’s amazing to compare the pictures and how similarly the nest is made and the eggs are placed!

Why Didn’t I Participate in the Great Backyard Bird Count?

Cindy — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 14:30:11 +0000

I can’t count that high!

My husband recently purchased a corn product for cattle feed that he placed uncovered in an open barn. I believe all the blackbirds this side of the Mississippi have found the pile of feed and think of it as their own. You can only imagine the thousands of birds (and the tons of bird poo) that have been hanging out with us the past several days!

And how did we spend part of our Valentine’s Day? We took a trip to Walmart to purchase tarps!

How was your Backyard Bird Count?

Birds of Winter

Melissa — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 01:22:48 +0000

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.

Photographing Birds

Cindy — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 19:31:24 +0000

Birds are speedy little creatures, aren’t they? Just when you’re ready to snap a great picture, off they fly! One of my missions this summer has been attempting to photograph birds better. I’ve definitely improved, but still have lots to learn about keeping birds still and my camera! LOL

I’m sharing just a few of my very novice pieces of advice below.

#1. Walk (or even sit) quietly under trees and look up. Do this in early spring before the leaves are fully grown to get the best pictures.

#2. Some birds, like the killdeer below, spend more time on the ground than in the air. This bird was resting in our garden near her nest of eggs. I knew she would be near, so I snuck into the garden quietly. You can see the picture is still a little blurry. I was fast, but she was faster.

#3. The zoom feature on my camera helped get this shot. Birds in our area are likely to be out, yet less active at dusk and I tend to be able to get more pictures. These birds weren’t frightened at all because I wasn’t close.

#4. Most people don’t care much for turkey vultures, but I tend to think they’re pretty cool. Not only are they majestic when flying, but they sure help with dead animal control on our farm! And for beginner photographers like me, they are quite obliging for photo ops.

Other things I’ve learned include:

-having your camera around at all times.

-visiting parks where birds hang around for the free food.

-walking without toddlers sometimes for noise control! :)

-sitting quietly near water where birds will stop by for a quick drink.

-placing bird feeders near the house .

I’d LOVE to hear your tips for capturing birds with a camera!

Our Beautiful Birds NaturExplorer Unit is packed full of ideas for learning more about these impressive animals.

~Cindy