I am a birder. I enjoy birding. At times this really annoys my family and gets a few wise cracks from friends of mine but it brings me way too much enjoyment to really care and as my brother stated, in an earlier post, he and I are competing this year to see who will find the most bird species so this year birding brings me the added pleasure of beating my older brother at something.
I keep a feeder in the yard and take note of the winged visitors that make their way to a free lunch. For the most part my children pay no attention to what is at the feeder at any given time so sometimes I prompt them to tell me what they see at the bird feeder. It normally goes something like this:
Me: Cristian, are their any birds at the feeder?
Cristian: Uhhhhhh, yea daddy there are some birds.
Me: What color are the birds? What size?
Cristian: One is red and it’s kinda big.
Carolina: Daddy there’s other birds on the ground too.
Alexandra: The red one is a cardinal.
Me: Carolina, what do the birds on the ground look like?
Carolina: ummmmm, I’m not sure, they’re just birds.
And Carolina would be correct. They are birds. This, however, is a teachable moment. This is where the learning happens. I slow my kids down and urge them to look more carefully. The two birds on the ground are sparrows but they are not the same species of sparrow. How ’bout the sparrow on the branches (below), also a sparrow, but a different species still. Questions begin to fill the air.
Alexandra: Well what kind of sparrows are they daddy?
Me: (smiling) Let’s go look them up.
And so we learn about our backyard visitors slowly but surely. We read that there are many types of sparrows and then try to identify the ones we see in our yard. We notice the unmistakable yellow headlights of the white throated sparrow and the neat, light brown top of the chipping sparrow. Identifying the song sparrow takes us a bit longer but we rule out other species and narrow it down to just a couple of possibilities before settling on the song sparrow.
Then we talk more about what we see.
Me: Why do you think they look so different if they’re all sparrows?
Alexandra: I don’t know.
Cristian: They just are.
Carolina: Maybe their colors help them fly better.
Alexandra: They can blend in with their environment.
Me: (nodding, smiling)
the suburban naturalists 