Winter Bird Study

Liz has gotten to be a rather good birder and photographer. She took these shots of the woodpecker and finches from indoors.

I just love this one!

We made pinecone birdie Valentines for the birds.

The gloves didn’t fit Alex so he did it bare-handed. You can tell he doesn’t like it.

Kate loved every second!

I love Tori’s reaction to the gooey-ness.

Kate loved her finished pinecone, ready to hang!

She picked a branch in our lone tree in our backyard.

We shook the pinecones in a baggie of birdseed and tied yarn to them.

Tori picked our shepherd’s crook to hang her pinecones.

Rubeus guarded the deck.

Recipe for Bird Pinecone Valentines:

• Large open pinecones
• Birdseed
• Peanut Butter
• Lard
• optional: dried fruit, berries, dried corn, seeds, nuts

The kids loved it that our Bible reading for the day was from Luke 12:22-34 about the birds and flowers. Serendipitous!

And we also read a lovely poetry book: Birds of a Feather by Jane Yolen.

Bird sightings in our backyard so far this month: chickadees, sparrows, scrub jays, towhees, finches, woodpecker, magpies, crows

Later in the season, Tori and Katie practiced “sewing” popcorn and cranberries onto thread for the birdies. I was impressed they completed the strand without much help.

It was pretty!

They placed their strands on our lilac bushes.

Each girl got a pair of binoculars for Christmas so we can go bird watching more.

We haven’t noticed too many birdies.

So, for our December nature study…

We read about pine trees in the HNS. Tori is 5 and Katie is 4 so they’re not much interested in listening to that yet.

The girls have observed lots of winter weather. The temps have been in the teens so we haven’t been outside as much as we’d like! We can sure see our breath outside! We haven’t gotten much snow, but there were some amazing icicles a couple weeks ago. We got to go sledding once (Alex did not like it). The girls love the pattern of snowflakes. They’re a little obsessed with Snowflake Bentley right now.

And then there was the wind. It blew and blew!  It was scary for them to realize how dangerous wind can be. We had a shingle wedge itself in our stucco! Fences and trees fell down. The girls helped with cleaning up after the wind stopped. They respect the power of wind now!

We have observed some interesting tree situations, especially after all those winds. Several were uprooted and we got to see the whole tree and study the roots that didn’t hold it in the ground.

Katie drew the HUGE pine tree that uprooted across the street, in the neighbor’s backyard. She impresses me with what she sees and how she can transfer that to paper. She’s only 4! I hope to develop this talent!

And it’s not often you can climb a tree that big, but the kids got all in it since it was laying on its side. We studied the pinecones at different levels of development. The bark was really papery in some places and hard in others. Of course, it smelled good: really piney, ha! We got to discuss roots and leaves and the differences in coniferous and deciduous trees.

We look forward to January and hope to have some snow!

Awesome woodpecker page and article here.

Check out the Great Backyard Bird Count info.

We love the notebooking pages at Productive Homeschooling.