Great Backyard Bird Count 2014

We've had a rare snowfall here in the midlands of Carolina. I couldn't resist taking pictures of birds and their tracks. We saw our typical favorites: northern cardinals, chipping sparrows, and goldfinches.





I also spotted two kinds of birds that are new to my feeder. How exciting! Truly! I squeal when I discover new birds. The first was something completely new to me: an eastern towhee. Its unusual behavior first caught my eye: the towhee was flicking leaves up as it foraged. Later, I spotted it perched on tree branches not far from a sparrow. Since towhees look like a large sparrow, the picture with the chipping sparrow clinched the identification for me.



The other bird that thrilled me is the slate-colored, dark-eyed junco. I first met them behind Pike's Peak where they live year round. In years of bird watching here, I've never seen any. Monday, I spotted a flock at the school. I loved seeing them at home today. Aren't they cute?



Long-time blog readers know that we celebrate the Great Backyard Bird Count every February. This year will be quite an event since Pamela and I will be counting at two locations: our schoolyard on Friday and our backyard the rest of the weekend. Because we needed to prepare an entire school for this event, I came up with several things to teach students and staff to identify birds. At the beginning of the new term last December, I incorporated a bird theme into some elements of our curriculum.

Living Books - At the beginning of the school year, the elementary students started reading UltraSwan by Elinor Osborn and The Wright Brothers by Quentin Reynolds. Now, they are reading John Audubon: Young Naturalist by Miriam Mason and the primary students are reading The Boy Who Drew Pictures by Jacqueline Davies. I also recommend a birthday present I gave to a young naturalist: For the Birds: The Life of Roger Tory Peterson by Peggy Thomas.

Nature Study - We have bird feeders stationed in the school yard, and students help us keep them filled. When playing outside for recess, students see things in nature and ask us about them. We give them proper names so that most of them have from saying red bird and blue bird to cardinal and blue jay. They also know mourning dove, robin, mockingbird, and tufted titmouse. Some students are quite advanced and know yellow-bellied sapsucker and Carolina chickadee. Instead just knowing the name of our state bird, many students can describe how the Carolina wren looks. They ask for the names of birds that they see while looking out the window at school and even at home. They have to give a good description, and then we head to our bird books.

Our staff and students have come a long way since the beginning of the school year. We are all more aware of birds and able to identify some and able to observe and describe them in enough detail to classify them. It's quite common for children to ask me about a bird that they saw at home or grab me at recess to take a picture of one. It's not unusual for students to flock around the big window near the bird feeders suddenly because one student exclaims, "I just saw a huge bird!" The other morning, one girl asked me to identify a bird. "It's brown on the back and has brown splotches on its chest. It's about the size of a blue jay. It was on the ground looking for seeds or worms." I showed her a picture of a brown thrasher, and she smiled, "That's it!"

One little boy's mother majored in biology in college. They were out bird watching and he said, "I think that's a tufted titmouse." She thought he was making up the name, so she looked it up on her smart phone. He was right, and she was amazed at what he knew about birds. We have a little flock of tufted titmice that adore our bird feeders.

For science, they have made detailed drawings of a dead yellow-bellied sapsucker that we found on the grounds one day. While recording observations in our science notebooks, a live sapsucker was bring into a red maple tree nearby, so we quietly stalked it and found the holes in the trunk. While we were gone, an anonymous bird dropped a "gift" onto one girl's notebook and we all had a good chuckle.






Science - To go along with the book on the Wright brothers, the students learned about Leonardo da Vinci's flying machines and built some models as described in this book. It also helped them understand some principles as flight and they saw how da Vinci used nature study to design his flying machines. They were quite amused at how da Vinci tested them.

Picture Study - The artist we chose for picture study this term is John James Audubon, specifically this book. Since we have about a dozen students per class on Fridays (our homeschooler day), we have two books and two pictures. They have to sit quietly and study the picture for at least two minutes. They are such chatterboxes it is hard for them not to talk. When they are ready, we close the books and each child gets a chance to say one thing. They go around in a circle until they run out of things to say. Then, they switch pictures.

Silhouettes - We've read several books about our state. Mama, Let's Make A Moon by Clay Rice, a silhouette artist who has been to our county many times, inspired us to study bird silhouettes. I've made about ten of them. Sometimes we hand out individual silhouettes to half the class and bird pictures to the other half. Each student has one. They have to match the silhouette with the picture. I used a picture from this GBBC blogpost as a guide.



Plans for February 14 - I plan to make copies of the checklist and count birds during the day. I'll have a small group of children with me to help me spot and count the birds. As always, I'll have my camera, bird books, and my Nook available for tricky identifications.

Old Friends and a New Friend

Except for last year, I have spent every President's Day weekend since 2009 at my kitchen door counting birds for the Great Backyard Bird Count—open worldwide for the first time ever. Don't let the bright sunny pictures and winter-blooming camellias in the pictures fool you. Every morning that I counted (Saturday through Monday), water in the bird bath iced over in the wee hours of the night. While the birds might have shivered on the chilly, windy days of the count (relatively speaking, my friends up North), I stayed warm. I set up my station so that I watch from inside and get some chores done when my eyes tire. Since we are doing so much science this year, I opted to do this count solo.

During the count, I sighted many old friends. The most exciting moment was today when I spotted a red-breasted nuthatch—a winter visitor to the Carolinas. I have not seen one since we moved from Colorado in 2001. Imagine my delight!



Another delightful moment was making a new friend. Today, I identified a ruby-crowned kinglet for the first time in my life. This teeny, tiny bird is another winter visitor to the Carolinas. Discovering unfamiliar birds makes bird-watching addictive. Talk about awe and wonder!





While some homeschools have children memorize the state this and the state that, I prefer to know these things by getting to know them in real life. Meet the South Carolina state bird, the Carolina wren. Its favorite food at our feeding station is suet, and I enjoy watching it hang upside-down on the suet cage. Relationships are vital and nourishing.



Two birds I find difficult to shoot with my camera are friendly Carolina chickadees and the tufted titmouse pictured below. These related species behave in the same way at the feeder. They hide in the safety of the camellia and do a hit and run on birds, fleeing back to their camouflaged position. What I love the most about the titmouse is its round face with a black button-eye. Relationships allow you to make connections.



The Baltimore oriole first caught my attention a few years back. First, I caught it taking a bath. Late, I figure out that, when an isolated spot in a camellia waved wildly back and forth, an oriole was feasting on camellia flowers. I never knew the bird enjoyed dining at our feeders until today! Relationships allow you to refine your observations.



SQUIRREL! When attention wanes, it helps to change your thoughts to something completely different!



Some things require closer attention. These birds—a mourning dove, Northern cardinal, and chipping sparrow—may appear friendly to you. They are not! In the past three days, I have seen them shove each other off feeders and defend their turf with fancy aerial acrobatics.



Forget about that cute little mockingbird song. The northern mockingbird is one of the biggest bullies on the block. I once watched one aggressively defends its crepe myrtle tree against a flock of migrating American robins. They think nothing of thunking a squirrel on the head. The mockingbird belongs behind bars!



Bird-watching invites curiosity! I catch myself tilting my head like this American goldfinch all the time!



Speaking of finches, I just love this shot of a house finch surrounded by camellias!



Only a few species of female songbirds in North America sing. The female Northern Cardinal is one of them. I did not know that! My next line of investigation will be to catch one in action.



As Valentine's Day was the day before the backyard count started, here are a few shots of my favorite couples!

We Came, We Saw, We Counted . . .

Last weekend, Pamela and I counted birds for the Great Backyard Bird Count and entered our data online and in our nature notebooks. We even made the obligatory watercolor. Until we painted, I had never noticed the light turquoise rim around the eye of a mourning dove.

Somehow, nature notebooks and watercolors have merged into one and the same. Guilt over having done only one watercolor this year has bugged me--and we didn't even put it in the notebook. We have made regular entries whenever we studied a topic (like painted butterflies, ladybugs, and camellias), all in markers. When I didn't have a study planned, the notebook collected dust. When I posted the pictures on Facebook, one wise friend opined that "we all have our favorite medium for drawing and do our best work with it." I think we will try other media and see what Pamela likes best. I have a feeling markers will win the day because she likes vivid colors and fluidity.

Charlotte Mason saw these notebooks as "travelling companions and life records wherein the 'finds' of every season, bird or flower, fungus or moss, is sketched, and described somewhat in the manner of Gilbert White" (Page 223). While I gloss over peers mentioned in her books, another brilliant friend emphasized the need to know who exactly Gilbert White was! White, an eighteenth-century naturalist, gardener, and priest in Hampshire, England, "observed things closely in their natural state" rather than "dissect and examine in detail the animal or plant before them; dead, cut off, out of it’s natural environment, there, on their table or desk" (Tony Grant). White kept regular, dated records of his locale so that he understood the life cycles in his habitat. If you peek into his book, you see occasional pictures and a great deal of description based upon years of careful observations like the ones Pamela has been making (and her wisterbuds are from watercolor pencils).


Since White and children differ in developmental levels, Mason scaffolded the study of nature. The source of these notebooks was the nature walk, an artful blend of atmosphere, discipline, and life, "Every day's walk gives him something to enter: three squirrels in a larch tree, a jay flying across such a field, a caterpillar climbing up a nettle, a snail eating a cabbage leaf, a spider dropping suddenly to the ground, where he found ground ivy, how it was growing and what plants were growing with it, how bindweed or ivy manages to climb" (Page 55). As soon as children could draw, they kept a nature diary illustrated with dry brush drawings. Over time, they form relationships with things in nature and "know a plant by its gesture and habitat, its time and its way of flowering and fruiting; a bird by its flight and song and its times of coming and going; to know when, year after year, you may come upon the redstart and the pied fly-catcher, means a good deal of interested observation" (Page 236). As the writing skills develop, children "keep records and drawings in a nature notebook and make special studies of their own for the particular season with drawings and notes" (Page 219). In later grades, they focus on knowing what to expect in a particular habitat, know the parts of different things, keep lists of birds and plants, and supplement their personal knowledge with carefully chosen books. In upper levels, their work begins to fit into branches of learning typically seen in schools gleaned through field work and scholarly books, instead of textbooks.

Because of Pamela's aphasia, I'm not sure how incidentally I can teach scientific vocabulary. Mason avoided dousing the joy of nature walks with a flood of scientific blather with beginner nature notebookers. Teachers threw in a word here or there, but too much jargon would make it harder for children to store up common knowledge needed to understand formal instruction in later years. The ultimate aim is for them to "know and delight in natural objects as in the familiar faces of friends" (Page 237). Books and occasional object lessons and microscope work supplement outdoor study. To give Pamela a framework, we are going to document signs of spring and note the life cycle of the neighbor's wisteria right now.

One thing you may notice about Pamela's nature notebook is the imperfect writing mechanics, especially in this world of beautiful lapbooks. Now, I am not knocking lapbooks at all, just illustrating a distinction. From a Mason point of view, we aim for notebooks to represent where our students are in their understanding and we hope for it to be a product of their hands, minds, and hearts, grammar glitches and all. If I mined notebook entries for writing lessons, Pamela would figure that out, robbing her of the joy of writing. Mason wrote, "Certainly these notebooks do a good deal to bring science within the range of common thought and experience; we are anxious not to make science a utilitarian subject" (Page 223).

A nature notebook records where she is today. If we peek into where she was two years ago--when we were wrapping up speech therapy a la the Association Method, we can see the progress from stilted, repetitive language to something more free and original. Mason pointed out, "The children keep a dated record of what they see in their nature notebooks, which are left to their own management and are not corrected. These notebooks are a source of pride and joy, and are freely illustrated by drawings (brushwork) of twig, flower, insect, etc." (Page 236).

I also wavered back and forth between wanting to keep my own notebook and feeling guilty because Eve Anderson, a thirty-year veteran of teaching PNEU schools, discouraged teachers from making their own entries during a nature study lesson. I began to think of my class of one student who loves to draw and writes with ease, albeit with a few errors here and there. Pamela really doesn't need me to supervise each and every step of making entries. Why not keep my own notebook? I shared that decision with friends on Facebook and a homeschooling friend wrote that she does the same. It helps her to be in the role of a fellow learner, easing the way to share pencils and paints and discuss color choices and observations. So, I am going to try keeping my own notebook, side-by-side with Pamela.

My friend Jeannette Tulis faced a similar dilemma. She taught a co-op class with 17 first graders and never had success with dry brush watercolor for the fine motor skills of her crew were not developmentally ready. They spent most of their time indoors but did head out on particularly beautiful days. Even though she didn't perfectly line up with a Mason nature study program, she met the number one objective of a Mason science program, to inspire awe and wonder: "Where science does not teach a child to wonder and admire it has perhaps no educative value" (Page 224). Tulis wrote, "I was delighted by the spark I saw in many of my students’ eyes as we learned together of the intricacy, wisdom and wonder of God’s creation. And that, in the words of several of my students, was truly cool!"

P.S. If you want to understand why nature notebooks are so valuable in teaching children many things, including science, check out Carroll Smith's keynote presentation on nature study. Be prepared to be inspired and have fingers itching to head straight outdoors and observe and record!

Man Your Battle Stations!

Four more days until the bird count! Are you ready?


Photo credit to Cleve Dowell and article by Cathy Gilbert of the Manning Times (Page 3)

The Santee National Wildlife Refuge is proud to announce their participation in the 13th Annual Great Backyard Bird Count, Feb. 12-15. This annual bird count is organized by the National Audubon Society and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology as a way for people of all ages and levels of bird-watching experience to participate in observing birds in their backyard, off their balcony or at their local refuge!

Manning resident Tammy Glaser participated last year with her daughter, Pamela, who is autistic and homeschooled. "We do the Backyard Bird Count because we follow a form of homeschooling (Charlotte Mason) that involves nature study," Glaser explained. "Plus, birds are so fun to watch and sometimes you see some interesting things. And you learn a lot. If it's not freezing cold, maybe we will sit on the back porch rockers since Pamela has an idea of what to expect this year."

Each year, tens of thousands of people throughout the U.S. and Canada take part in the Great Backyard Bird Count. Each checklist will contribute valuable information for conservation, by submitting the data online. The information gathered through this bird count will help scientists understand how the distributions of birds are changing over time.

The Santee National Wildlife Refuge will host an early morning bird walk on Saturday, Feb. 13, starting at 7:30 a.m. as part of the Great Backyard Bird Count. Refuge staff hopes to observe wintering sandhill cranes as well as snow geese from the trail’s observation tower to add to the count tally. Ducks, geese and a variety of wintering songbirds may also be seen. Interested participants should meet at the visitor center.

"We are also encouraging visitors to the refuge to observe and keep track of all birds seen during the 4-day count period," said Susan Heisey, Park Ranger. "Individuals interested in participating can pick up a bird check list at the refuge’s visitor center or information kiosk at the Cuddo Unit and start counting. Not only is the count keeping track of different species seen but also numbers of each of those species."

"Once a person has completed their hike, drive, or bicycle ride around the refuge, they can return their checklist to the refuge visitor center, where staff will compile the sightings of all participants," Heisey said. Individuals must return their checklist to the visitor center no later than Feb. 15 for their count to be included. "If the visitor center is not open when you come by, the refuge will have a box on the front porch for folks to leave their checklists," she added. "Please make sure that participant names and contact information is included."

Santee National Wildlife Refuge was established in 1941 as a sanctuary for migratory birds. The refuge encompasses just over 12,400 acres of habitat along the banks of Lake Marion in four separate units. The refuge visitor center as well as the Santee Indian Mound and site of Fort Watson are located on the Bluff Unit, 8 miles south of Summerton on Hwy 15/301. Santee National Wildlife Refuge is one of 550 national wildlife refuges across the country that make up over 150 million acres of land and water for fish and wildlife conservation. The refuge system offers a variety of outdoor activities, including fishing, hunting, environmental education, wildlife observation and photography. Each year, about 40 million Americans discover the wonders of nature by visiting a wildlife refuge. There is at least one wildlife refuge in every state and one within an hour’s drive of most major cities.

For more information about the Great Backyard Bird Count and visitor opportunities at the Santee National Wildlife Refuge, contact Susan Heisey, Park Ranger, at 478-2217 or email susan_heisey@fws.gov.

Mark Your Calendars!

It's that time of year again . . . next weekend is the Great Backyard Bird Count! Rather than repeat what I have blogged before, here are some posts to give you some perspective and advice:

The Value of Nature Study
Scaffolding Kids in the Bird Count
Day One of GBBC 2009
Final Day of GBBC 2009

At first, you might find it hard to identify birds. This one completely mystified me last year, and I kept thinking it was an American goldfinch. Every day, I watched it sample camellia fruit from a neighbor's yard. I could always tell the bird was there by the way one cluster of leaves would wave wildly and then I would see a flash of gold, followed by another cluster dancing around. One day I caught him (the flashy color gives his gender away) taking a bath. I snapped a photograph and emailed an Audobon Society representative in our area. It turned out my "finch" was really a juvenile Baltimore oriole. The drab orange made him look finch like from a distance. This year, he is sporting bold orange colors, leaving no doubt of his identity!



Bird-watching feels like a treasure hunt sometimes. This morning, I walked outside and heard the sweetest music imaginable. Perched in the three pecan and two oak trees in our yard were hundreds, maybe thousands of robins, making me believe that Punxsutawney Phil got it wrong this year, ignoring the Facebook photos of my friends in the D.C. area attacked by Snowzilla.

Last year, the kids and I startled at a huge thud against the window of the television room and had a rare opportunity to photograph and record our first headbanger bird. Last year, we spotted a gorgeous painted bunting, even during a rare snowfall. Even if we don't meet any new friends this year, we will enjoy seeing our faithful ones.

You don't need much to get started. Birds need food and water. We have the bird bath stationed right next to the food supplies: suet in a suet cage, seeds in a feeder, and a bag of thistle. Some birds use both, but others feed on what's wild in the yard: robins and their worms, chipping sparrows and their pecans, orioles and their fruit.

We also have bird books and a notebook with clear pictures of birds we typically see in our yard. I usually take pictures first and then look things up because cropping and zooming in on specific features helps me nail an identification.

Really, other than the set up, it doesn't take much time. You only need to spend fifteen minutes, counting, and a few more of entering data. It is really cool to be part of a nation-wide scientific study! Join us!