Winter Bird Feeding

Tree felled by hurricane Irene in August.

We always have so much fun feeding our feathered friends. Our weather this year has been so unusual -- a hurricane shut down Connecticut for a week in early September, then a fluke snowstorm at the end of October put the brakes on fall before the leaves had even thought about changing color.  All this, followed by one of the warmest autumns we have seen in years. The week after the New Year began, we were all gathered around a bonfire for an evening of outside fun -- in sweatshirts!

But, this IS New England, and into every year a little winter must fall. The weatherman was predicting a turn in the weather, so we spent last weekend making sure that all our feeders were well-stocked. And we decided to make some pine cone feeders as a Sunday project.

First step... find some pine cones!
We headed out for a little hike to find the materials for our project before lunch. This was a nice time to talk a little about plant identification, and enjoy a crisp January day.


While I readied my camera (can't leave home without it!) and backpack, the youngest hiking partner headed out to find pine cones. He came back, dejected, to say that all he could find was a little one (which was actually a hemlock cone).

We walked into the woods, and I showed my son a seedling pine (below). Of course, it would have no cones, but what it told us was that there was a mature pine somewhere nearby. So onward we looked.

Many people call all evergreen, needle-bearing trees, "pines."  However, for a pine cone feeder, other large cones simply won't do. So it is important to know what to look for (or just go to Wal-Mart and buy a bag of pine cones -- but what's the fun in that?).

We didn't have to walk very far before we saw...

THE MOTHER PINE!

Pinus strobus,  Eastern White Pine

Pines can be much larger than this tree, but, compared to the rest of the woodlot, this tree was a monster. And it was the only pine as far as the eye could see. So we deduced that all the baby pines we had seen on the forest floor were all the offspring of this tree.

In the forestry industry, in a stand of trees of the same species, there are often giant, very fertile individuals that sometimes tower above the rest of the woodlot. These are referred to as wolf trees, and are often used as seed sources. This pine reminded me of a wolf tree, but it was really the only pine in the stand. We hiked to the base to look for cones, knowing that any cones still on the tree would be very high up, out of reach. 

White Pine cones

We were in luck -- there were hundreds of them. We chose cones that had their scales open (you'll see why when we get to the cooking part).  We inspected the white pine we had found, and talked about how the bald eagles in Maine prefer white pines for nesting, as they tower above the other trees and offer a sturdy set of branches for their huge nests. Have you ever seen a bald eagle's nest? It is truly an immense structure. Put it on your "bucket list."

Pine identification

Do you know how to identify a white pine? It's really quite simple. 

Pines are classified as 2-needle pines, 3-needle pines and 5-needle pines. If you look closely at a pine branch, you will see that the needles grow in clusters, with a brown, papery "sleeve" at the base of the cluster. If you pull the needles close together, they will fit close together, and form a cylindrical "tube", which, long, long ago, was the actual leaf of the pine. Over time, the trees evolved and the leaves split into needles of various configurations, but all held together by that papery sleeve.

White pine needles in 5's

White pines are a 5-needle pine, which means their needles are bundled together in groups of 5. There aren't many native 5-needle pines in the East, so this helps us narrow down the field a bit. What's more, white pine needles are fine and soft, and seem to flow off the branch -- they don't stand out stiffly as some others do.

Here is a photo comparing the hemlocks which vexed our son so, next to a seedling pine. The pine is at the right, center. Hemlock cones are only about 1/2 inch long, so they wouldn't really work for our purposes, but they make cute additions to potpourri (that's for another day...)

 

We filled our bag with cones, and headed back to let the frost thaw off them while we had a bowl of hot vegetable soup and a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch. Then it was on to...

Pine cone bird feeder time!

I hope you cook at home with your kids. There is so much to learn by cooking, you use all your five senses,  you talk to one another, and learn a life skill. AND you can eat what you make (usually). Before you say, "Not this time," I have to tell you that I once ground my own beef fat with dried cranberries, bird seed, peanuts and raisins, to make my own suet cakes. We used a big stainless steel sausage grinder, and my eldest son and I took turns grinding. While I went to get the containers to freeze the suet cakes in, my little one sampled the beef suet!

Ingredients

• large pine cones
• peanut butter (smooth or chunky)
• lard or shortening
• bird seed
• string
• a medium saucepan and wooden spoon
• a cookie sheet and waxed paper

Scoop peanut butter into the saucepan (we used about 1/2 cup for 6 pine cones). Add about 1/4 cup of lard or vegetable shortening (if your winter isn't below freezing, use lard, as the vegetable shortening will melt from the feeders and be messy). When the peanut butter mixture is melted (be careful not to scorch it), add about 1 cup of bird seed. (We used mixed milo and black oil seed, but any mix will do). Let the mixture cool until the peanut butter is back to spreadable consistency. 


  When the peanut butter mixture is cool, spread it onto the pine cones, pushing the mixture under the scales of the cone (this is why we wanted cones with the scales all the way open). I used my fingers, but my son wasn't fond of the feeling of the peanut butter on his hands, so he used a plastic knife.


Continue spreading until you have filled all your pine cones. If you want, roll the finished cones in additional bird seed to cover (we didn't think about this until after we finished).


Carefully tie string between the scales near the stem end of the cone (don't just tie around the stem, as the string will slide off -- use the last scales as a "hook" for the string).


Place your pine cone feeders on the cookie sheets (lined with waxed paper) to dry a bit.

To make them easier to handle, we placed our cookie sheet on the patio table, so the peanut butter would freeze. My son worried that the birds would eat them -- then we kind of laughed about this, since that was, in fact, the point of it all!


We tied our feeders to the trees, creating little S-hooks out of paper clips, and placing the feeders all around the bottom branches of a tree where we hung our other feeders. 




A Migrating Surprise!

Monday, the weather was unsettled, warming up strangely before a mighty wind rushed in. There was a winter storm brewing for Monday evening, and the wildlife was preparing. About mid-day, I noticed that the cats and dog were lined up, eagerly observing something outside. When I went to see what they were spying on, I saw...

Bluebirds!

There was about a dozen of them, on the pine cone feeders, on the suet basket, under the feeders... One even flew within a foot of the excited pets, to pick up some dropped seeds right by the sliding door.  They stayed all afternoon, feasting with the chickadees, juncos and titmouses.

The next day, we had three inches of snow. Not much by New England standards, but probably enough for the bluebirds to say, "You know, I think it's time to get moving." By Tuesday, the juncos and chickadees ate without their blue friends.

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Follow-up Possibilities

If you haven't checked out our unit on thrushes, Bird Migration: A Study of Robins and Other Thrushes, please do -- it offers the possibility of a year-long study of migration and a host of other topics.

The Handbook of Nature Study website always has timely nature study activities -- Barbara has been posting a lot on winter feeder birds -- check out her website frequently.

We continue to read the Burgess Bird Book for Children -- we downloaded it to the Nook Color, which is very exciting to our tech savvy 8-year-old. You can also read it online, for free, via the Baldwin Project. You can read it from cover to cover, as we are doing, or you can read just the chapters on thrushes: 

• Peter Learns Something He Hadn't Guessed (Robin and Bluebird)
• Voices of the Dusk (Wood Thrush)

We are enjoying exploring our woods, and we have a number of evergreen plants to observe: pines, hemlocks, mountain-laurel, princess pine, partridgeberry, wintergreen, and some really hardy ferns that aren't really evergreen, but try hard to be! We will probably do some reading in the Handbook of Nature Study, on one of our local evergreen plants.

We were sad to hear that our favorite Bird Stack birdwatching site is closing down. We want to continue to take data on our bird feeder friends. Here are some options we might choose from:

1. Project FeederWatch's tally sheets - great data on weather and birds, even if you are not participating in the study (but DO! -- it's fun)
2. The Great Backyard Bird Count 2012 - officially February 17-20, but the form could be used any time. If you haven't ever participated, DO!
3. The Notebooking Treasury has a bundled set of notebooking pages, Nature Study: Birds - Complete Set, with a page for just about any bird study you would want to do on any bird you'd like to study.

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Do you have a preschooler or kindergartner at home? Take a look at our web page on Building a Snowman -- a great integrated unit for the classroom teacher, as well.

Stay tuned for our next blog, to see where we take our birdwatching and nature study endeavors...

The Nightshade Family (and a Little Surprise)

We had begun this plant family study when Barbara introduced the September Challenge on Weeds, Seeds and Other Delights. What timing!

We are having such a successful time studying birds family by family, that we decided to do the same with plants. And we have so many "cousins" in this family, right in our vegetable garden: tomato, potato, pepper, eggplant, the rogue tomatillo from years gone by. Also our little petunia basket.

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The Nightshade family (Solanaceae)

Our garden has quite a few members of the nightshade family. It is a nice family to study for nature study, as it originated here in the Western Hemisphere (although its ancestors didn't resemble most of our common garden varieties now).

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Read-Alouds:
 
I have this thing about books about gardening. I usually go through periods of bringing home armloads from the library, followed by more restrained times where I bring home some chapter books. All through the summer, we read a great number of books about vegetable and flower gardening. Here are some favorites (from this summer and previous years):

In Enzo's Splendid Garden, by Patricia Polacco (anything by Patricia Polacco is terrific)
The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett (good connection to history)
Miss Rumphius, by Barbara Cooney (so many Maine connections for us)
The Giving Tree, by Shel Silverstein (this book always made my boys cry...)

There are so many... You can get so much mileage out of the ones above, because the characters are so delightful. Lots of life lessons.

We also took the time this summer to study Genesis 1 and 2, to learn about the Garden of Eden, when we began our series of read-alouds about gardens.

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Notebooking:

We started our notebooking with a colored sketch of our common nightshade, which tumbles along our back fence behind the wildflower garden. We had fun sketching together. I found that my son did a nicer job with his detail when I sketched along with him. And I enjoyed myself too -- how often do we stop to spend that time with one another, just BEING?


 We noticed as we sketched that we had a hitchhiker, who we will talk about later...

We found a diagram of a potato plant  that we studied and colored. We wanted one that was more like a diagram, and not cartoony.


We used a number of blank notebooking pages from the Notebooking Treasury, because we did a lot of sketching of the nightshade plants and other "cousins".


Here are some other places for notebooking pages on these plants:


The Outdoor Hour Challenge Crop Plant Challenges Notebook Pages include pages for a number of common vegetable garden plants, including tomato. Here is a link to a sample.


Homeschool Notebooking has free pages for download, on many topics.


Enchanted Learning has so many pages, diagrams, mini-books and activities, that you are bound to find something to include in your notebook. My little guy doesn't always like to sketch, but he enjoys diagrams, so this is a good place to go for things to add to your drawings.

 

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Background Information:

The Handbook of Nature Study has several pages (pp. 582-584) about the petunia, the flowery cousin to the common nightshade and its vegetable friends. Petunias are nice to use to study the flower structure of the nightshade family, as the flower parts are big.

Here is a case where there isn't a lot that can substitute for just going out and working in the garden. Even in the years when the garden doesn't do well, we always learn something new and get a refreshed spirit from working with seeds and soil.

If you didn't have a vegetable garden this year, think of putting even a container garden in next year.
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Lesson Ideas and Links:

1. Grow a Vegetable Garden

We spent a lot of time gardening while we studied this plant family. We learned about how common nightshade is poisonous, while the other cousins in our garden are not. As we gardened, we compared the flowers, and talked about how botanists use the flowers to identify a plant.

We have about a zillion cherry tomatoes, and they are so much better than the store ones! Two of our four kids don't like tomatoes, but the other two love them. We also have plum tomatoes, some big, meaty, pink-fleshed ones, and, of course, Brandywines. We picked a bunch before Hurricane Irene, just in case, but the plants did well, even thought the heirlooms have climbed far out of their cages. 
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We had started digging potatoes just before the hurricane, and I'm sure that we have a ton of them -- if it can just stop raining! Our soil was already quite wet before Irene, and I think we've only had 2 or 3 days without rain since she passed through our way. I just walked the dog, and the ground sounds like a sponge. At any rate, the first potatoes were delicious for breakfast,  so we're looking forward to the rest.


Malik planted some potatoes in his little garden, too. He found digging potatoes to be fun but tiring.
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I planted the cutest little eggplants this year. I am the only one who likes eggplant in the house, but I think the flowers are beautiful. Don't you? Like our nightshade flowers, on vitamins.

The ones I planted have little fruit (about 3" long), which are purple and white striped. We had to fight the squirrels for the fruit this year. Last year, they would wait until the fruit were just beginning to look like eggplants, then they would strip the branches off! GRRRR!

This year, they started, but our cats spent their first summer outside since they were born, and I think that discouraged the squirrels enough to let the eggplants have a fighting chance. I think we are doing well!

I am amazed at how resilient eggplants are. We have had one of the wackiest summers that I can remember -- about two weeks of near 100 degree, humid weather, followed by a cold spell, followed by tropical, followed by hurricane... And they keep coming!

We have not seen any potato beetles on any of our nightshade family plants this year. Last year there were a few on the eggplants, but I picked them off by hand once, and that did the trick. A few holes on the potatoes, but that's it.

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Our hot peppers were not nearly as resilient as the eggplants, potatoes and tomatoes. It's always tricky, timing the planting. Peppers don't like being cold. And it seems like they never really recover from being set out when the soil is too cold. My plants are small. The peppers are tasty, but there could be more of them. Next year, we'll wait, then we'll plant more.

If you want a great hot pepper for your garden, grow Hot Lemon Peppers. They are pretty, bright lemon yellow, and produce a ton of peppers that are about 3 inches long. I'm not sure why, but no vendors had them available this year. It must have been a bad seed year last year. At any rate, if you are seed catalog shopping this winter, and see them for sale, buy them (we usually buy plants). You'll be pleased.

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If you want to do a nice botany study, the nightshade family makes a nice choice, since there are so many members that you can find at your local garden center. Plus, you get to eat the results of your study!  In these two photos, you can see how the shape of the potato leaves is very similar to the shape of the common nightshade leaves, below. But the habit of the nightshade (almost vine-like) is more like the old-fashioned tomatoes that we have in the garden.

For older children, slicing the fruits lengthwise (stem end to flower end) and sketching the arrangement of the seeds would be a very beneficial botanical study. You will need a hand lens to compare the fruit of the common nightshade. Did you know that all the fruits are berries?



I wanted to find the strange nightshade weed cousin, Jimson-weed, to add to our studies, but have not found any in the vacant lots on our walks. I will have to check by the railroad tracks. When I've found Jimson-weed before, it was in a grassy, overgrown second growth meadow.  The fruits of Jimson-weed are prickly. Jimson-weed, like nightshade, is poisonous.









When I was a little girl, we called the bright red fruits of nightshade "poison berries." I read in one source that 200 of these would be enough to kill a grown man.
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2. Make a Plant Press

Before the hurricane, we built a simple plant press, following the directions in Barbara McCoy's blog post, "How to Make a Plant Press."  We will continue with our plant press project after things dry out a little bit!

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3. Learn Some Scientific Names

My son enjoys the scientific names for the plants and animals we study. For more information on Latin binomials and binomial nomenclature, see my article, "Animal, Vegetable or Mineral? Scientific Names and the Natural World."

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4. Practice Penmanship

When we first started homeschooling last fall, we struggled with our little guy's handwriting. He had learned so many bad handwriting habits, and it took a lot of practice (and holding the bar high) to get things back in shape. Charlotte Mason would say of copywork and penmanship, "Accept only excellence."

We use our vocabulary sometimes as a source for copywork. This is what we did with our nightshade family plant names.

Because Malik is in third grade, we practice manuscript several times a week, but we also work on cursive.

As a teacher, I always introduced the letters in the order of ease of creating them: the "loop" letters first -- e, l; then the closed loop letters -- i, t, u, w (a little trickier).  We only write words that we have studied the letters of, or we practice joinings, only.  The photo below shows some cursive practice of joinings.

Periodically, I have my son "grade" himself on slant, size and shape of his letters. We also put a smiley or star next to our favorite word or joining on the page.

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5. Bug Study

We discovered an interesting, as yet unidentified, insect who hitched a ride on the nightshade we sketched. Malik named him, "Buggy." It looks like a shield bug, but it eats holes in the leaves, and most true bugs are sap drinkers.

Buggy is very happy in a plastic container with a fresh supply of nightshade leaves regularly provided.  We will keep trying to identify him (unless one of you can!). It doesn't seem to like the other nightshade family plants nearly as much as he likes common nightshade.

Fall is a great time to do a bug study. Friday, we will be posting about the incredible crop of anthills that have sprung up in our driveway this summer.



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For classroom teachers looking for integrated studies centering on nature study, download my September newsletter, "The Little Green Corner," posted today.

Flying Creatures, Lesson 1: What is Zoology?

Lesson 1: What is Zoology?

How We Implemented "Exploring Creation With Zoology 1: Flying Creatures of the Fifth Day," Lesson 1

Links will be updated as we add new blogs and web pages. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list, but an List of the activities, projects and resources that we actually used to complete the lesson (like a window into our science class!).

Please check back for web pages on key concepts, strategies and skills as I write them.

Key Concepts: binomial nomenclature, flight, habitats, instinct, extinction, variables, experiments
Key Strategies: using mnemonic devices, keeping a notebook
Key Skills: observation, forming and testing a hypothesis, collecting data, narration, notetaking, comparing and contrasting

Subtopics 

(Includes links to corresponding blog posts and web pages, as we complete each part and blog on it)
 

$7.95 at Barnes & Noble

• Classification (pp. 2-4)
• Latin (pp. 4-5)
• Binomial Nomenclature (p. 5)
• Flight (p. 6)
• Uplifting Pressure (p. 6-7)
• Airfoil (p. 8)
• What a Drag (p. 8)
• Habitats (p. 12-13)
• Instinct (p. 14)
• Extinction (pp. 15-17)
• Extinction Errors (p. 17)

Additional Readings

$14.94 at Barnes & Noble

• Vocabulary Bridges From English to Latin & Greek (Trivium Pursuit)
• Genesis 1:1-2:3 
• The Burgess Bird Book for Children
• The Burgess Animal Book for Children 
• Handbook of Nature Study 
• "The Sing-Away Bird," by Lucy Larcom

Activities, Experiments, & Projects

Experiments in Flight: Lift, Thrust & Drag

Showing and Telling:

• "Fascinating Facts About Zoology" notetaking activity 
• Oral narration and notebooking (daily)
• Written Narration: "What Do You Remember?"
• Notebook Activity: Habitats, Instinct, Extinction
• Scripture copywork (manuscript and cursive)
• Vocabulary Crossword

Strategies to Learn:

•  Try This! (Mnemonic Devices)
• Mid-Lesson Break: Your Notebook

Experiments to Conduct:

• Try This! (How Air Pressure Works) 
• Mid-Lesson Experiment: Experimenting With Glider Designs

 Things to Research:

• Notebook Activity: Biome Research

Things to Create:

• Notebook Activity: Make a Field Notebook
• Zoology Mini-books: "Animal Kingdom" and "Extinct and Endangered Animals Collection"

Other Things to Do:

• Project: Nature Scavenger Hunt
• Fly Higher: Zoology projects (My guy chose to study Latin roots and word chunks for his word study lessons)

Other Links and Internet Resources

$27.95 at Barnes & Noble

• BibleGateway.com
• Apologia Course website (password protected)
• Handbook of Nature Study (Harmony Arts)
• North American Birds (Notebooking Treasury)
• Apologia TOC Planners (Donna Young's Homeschool Resources and Printables)
• Venn Diagram (Houghton Mifflin)
• "Beaks & Feet" Worksheet (Biology Corner)
• Feeder Birds Coloring Book (Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology)
• Outdoor Hour Challenge -- Birds: Jays and Bluebirds
• Outdoor Hour Challenge -- Birds: House Sparrow, House Wren and Mourning Dove

Summer Bird Study: Blue Jays

We are so enjoying this little break from all the heat this summer. If you live in almost anywhere in the United States, you know exactly what I'm talking about. It is amazing to conduct a nature study during extreme weather conditions, because you always learn something new about the adaptability of the natural world.

We are participating in the Outdoor Hour Challenges (although we are a little behind!), so we headed out earlier this month to see what birds came to our summer feeders, and to choose one for further study. My youngest selected the raucous Blue Jay for his study, and we found Outdoor Hour Challenge #2, "Jays and Bluebirds."

We see Blue Jays regularly at our summer feeder, but not as frequently as we do at our winter feeder (which is why we included a winter photo here, of a little feeding study we did while we were in the kitchen baking on winter day). They prefer more woodlot for breeding than we have near our city lot.

We are using Apologia Science's Exploring Creation with Zoology 1: Flying Creatures of the Fifth Day for a science text book this year, so we are learning about scientific nomenclature, and made this the focus of our bird study. When we consulted the Handbook of Nature Study, we found that crows and jays were closely related; our field guide told us they were both in the Family Corvidae (Crows and Jays).

We studied the Blue Jays that came to our feeder, as well as their more numerous cousins, the American Crows. We focused our observations on the features that made them similar, and the ones that were different, by comparing the crow and the jay, using a Venn diagram with categories: beaks & feet, color, food, size, habits and body shape. Adding comparison categories to a Venn diagram makes the comparisons more meaningful than many children will make without these prompts.

We also closely examined the Latin name for Blue Jay, because we learned that the Latin name for an animal describes it so that any zoologist in the world knows some basic information about it, just by its name:

Cyanocitta cristata = blue, city, crested = blue, crested bird that you find in the city ... pretty accurate!

We will be continuing our studies of the blue jay and other feeder birds this month, and will add more detailed observations, making a field journal, doing a feeding experiment, and listening to the calls and songs of our feeder bird friends. We have been using the bird study sheets from the June newsletter (from the Handbook of Nature Study), as well as bird study notebooking pages from the Notebooking Treasury (see their sale coupon, on the sidebar, for Back to School Savings!).

If you want a fun activity to do with your kids, that will reinforce how living things are classified, check out "Taxonomy Fun," a PBS page that invites kids to sort photographs of animals and state their "rule" for classification. You can also do this activity using photographs from nature magazines. 

National Geographic always has a ton of great information for kids to use for online research. Check out their page on the Blue Jay, for photos, videos, calls and songs, and lots of information for further study about Blue Jays. For example, did you know that young blue jays often stay with their parents for more than one year, helping the parents to tend the next year's batch of babies? Also, if you find a blue jay nest, you will discover that the mother blue jay likes to add interesting objects, such as twist-ties, colorful plastic food wrappers, and shiny pieces of foil, to her nest of sticks. And the normally boisterous jay sits perfectly motionless and silent, if you happen upon the nest when mom is sitting on her eggs.

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I've updated some of my other articles on observation:

Science Skills: Making Observations and Asking Questions Like a Scientist now includes additional links, updates and class pet ideas. Come and see the new module on easy class pets (all tried and true, based on my classroom experiences!). Check out some unusual critters to keep in the classroom, and my list of not-so-great class pets. Additional links to websites and downloadable resources also included.

The Power of Observation: Life in a Tiny Ecosystem has new activities, and new content, as well as

additional links to blogs and notebooking resources on mosses, lichens and fungi. Check out the discount links to notebooking pages you can use with this activity and other nature study projects, and try my new poll on science process skills.

If you missed my last blog post, check out our study of shark teeth and other beach combing activities, in Beachcombing, Part I: Shark Teeth. 

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What does it take to be a great teacher? See The 12 Qualities That Great Teachers Share, from the Washington Post.