Learning about Birds

 One of our recent interests is learning about birds. When I was looking through books a while back I ran across an old booklet (I think it was written in the 1930s) called Bird Stories by Wm. T. Cox and Dietrich Lange. It is a collection of stories written about MN birds that had been published in the Farmer Bird Club. I decided to add reading it aloud to our morning school starting time (when we pray, work on memory verse, sing and exercise). We have been reading about one bird each day. The kids have found the stories quite fun and it made them very interested in birds. We were trying to look up each one in the bird book ( to see a color picture) but found the bird books we had to be rather incomplete, so I splurged and spent $30 to buy a nice MN bird book with an accompanying CD that has all their calls on it.

    It has been fun to watch the kids' interest grow and watch them really observe the birds as they are coming North for the summer (a few birds do stick around for the winter too). They have been wanting to do things to help the birds too so I found a bunch of books from the library that tell how to make your yard hospitable to birds. We haven't done a whole lot yet but we do have plans! :-)

   The kids have had fun making a few bird houses lately though. Aaron started it off by deciding to make one for Grandpa for his birthday. This is it:

Then Jonathan and Megan worked together to make a bright red one. (Reading later made us wonder if that was a very good color choice.)

Mara made this tin can one. We had seen instructions in an old Ranger Rick magazine that said you could make bird houses out of tin cans, milk cartons and other containers of that sort. I am curious to see if they get used.

  The last two days a fun lunch time game is to pick out what bird we want to "be". That has caused some extra looking into the bird book to make sure we are choosing one with traits and abilities and looks that we particularly like. It has been some simple fun and laughter too as they wonder how well a Meadow Lark can mother a Turkey.

   We have a friend that is getting her masters in birding and she has agreed to take us birding with her some time this Spring. We are looking forward to that. The more we learn about birds the more amazed we are at God's amazing ability as Creator!