Birding with your little chicks

As part of our Families in Nature series, we engage in activities that allow us to follow our child’s interests while promoting tangible interaction with the natural world.  I tell my students “this isn’t a museum!” and encourage the feeling of bark texture, the eating of stinging nettle and the smelling of pond mud.  We naturally begin in this world as process-minded little people and somewhere along the way we get too focused on the product.  Process is useful in nature exploration, product is good in cooking, is the way I look at it.  Of course I don't cook, I eat, but that's another topic entirely.

Be a bird call translation machine with your kids.

Birding together as a family is a great way to get outside before the heat of the day in summer and promote some good listening skills.  One really fun way to encourage thoughtful listening to bird song is to introduce mnemonic devices.  I remember the day I learned (as a 5-year-old child) that the Barred Owl says “Who Cooks for you? Who cooks for you all?” and I never forgot it.  As a kid, it’s fun and almost magical to imagine the birds are talking in their birdy language, and that we can translate it into ours with a little training.

Many of our extremely common bird residents have songs that easily mimic a sentence in English, or sound like a familiar noise.  The male Red-winged Blackbird, for example, says:

“Booker-T!”

“I’m a wiiiiiinner!”

“Red-wing-black-biiiird”

"Conk-a-reeee!"

Challenge:  What does the female Red-winged Blackbird sound like?  Can you develop a mnemonic for her? 

My two-year-old son can imitate the sounds of many birds, not all of them chickens or ducks.  His chicka-dee-dee-dee impression carries the same musical rhythm of the actual Black-capped Chickadee call, gets him excited about what he’s hearing, and cements the experience in his mind.  

Have you ever heard a bird hail a cab before?  Listen for the Pacific slope Flycatcher whose distinctive cab hailing whistle will make you wonder if you’re on Bainbridge Island or the streets of New York City…

Bottom line: Don't get overwhelmed with birding.  Memorize 2 or 3 easy bird calls that you can actually remember and learn a mnemonic for playing it back in your mind.  Any good bird identification guide will give you mnemonics or phonetics along with the bird description, but you can easily invent your own - or, even better - have your child invent one with you!

 For more birding by ear tricks and birdsong mnemonics, join us for Families in Nature programs, part of our EnviroExplorations series.  For details go to www.islandwood.org/events.