Threats in our Neighborhood Bird World

Birds: Pigeon & Mockingbird

Our observations of this week's bird, the pigeon, happened while we were driving so we don't have any pictures. We frequently see flocks of them in the farm fields as we pass, and they can always be seen on the underpasses as we are waiting for a light or driving underneath.

This past weekend we went to visit the grandparents, and a favorite activity is going to the river to feed the birds. We always see ducks, geese, seagulls, and many other varieties.

And now . . . for the drama of our neighborhood. The birds who nest in our neighborhood had to be on their toes yesterday! In the morning we had a pair of Red-Tailed Hawks soaring overhead-- everyone was hidden away and very quiet. In the afternoon a pair of Crows ventured into the neighborhood and they were ganged up on and noisily driven off.

In the evening, we had another threat- a neighborhood cat looking for a snack.
On our neighbor's deck there is a Say's Phoebe couple who recently had their eggs hatch. The presence of the cat created some interesting behavior- While making an injured call, the male fluttered above the cat, and then would land in the empty lot behind us, a short distance from the cat- trying to lure the cat away from the house. This continued the whole time the cat was hanging around.

Male Say's Phoebe (sitting on fire pit)

The Female ventured off the nest for a minute to check on the situation (sitting on railing). The nest is located on a ledge around the upper, outer edge of the deck.

After hearing this call for some time a number of other birds decided they needed to know what was happening. We were able to watch Robins, House Finches, Starlings, and Meadowlarks land nearby, assess the situation, and continue on their way. The cat continued to slink through the yard- hiding in bushes and laying in the grass- while the birds managed to stay out of his reach. The cat didn't realize there IS a Mourning Dove nest nearby in the weeds of the empty lot, but they were smart and didn't come out to see what was happening.

Prickly Pear Cactus

For our last week of Wildflowers the kids decided to learn more about the Prickly Pear Cactus. We used this CSU site for information, and read the fun poem My Grandma is Like a Flowering Cactus. The kids did a journal page and have decided we should bring some Prickly Pear home to eat. We'll look at the store next time we are there.

Nyah's:

Austin's:

Owls & Crows & Swallows- Oh My!!

We have been taking the last couple weeks off from "school," so we haven't been doing the nature challenges as laid out, but we have had some wonderful birding experiences we want to share with everyone.

We have made several more visits to our "Owl Tree," but it has been a week or so since we last saw the owls there. I've been thinking they were owlettes, and have now moved out of the nest. In any case, we miss them.

During a daytime visit we decided to venture under the "Owl Tree," and what a sight! Bird feathers and legs, various bones and animals skulls, a rabbit leg with attached rabbit foot (making my childhood rabbit's foot now seem a little creepy), and owl pellets.
We collected a few owl pellets and took them home. I admit they sat in a container on the counter for a few days before I worked up the courage for us the further investigate.

Digging in!! Despite the provided "tools" (plastic utensils and rubber gloves) my kids just dug in- literally with their hands.
The owl pellets had a nice variety- vertebrae pieces of different sizes, the jaw of some rodent with teeth intact, and plenty of other little bones.
Some of the feathers my kids collected- some we recognized as possibly belonging to a black-billed magpie, another as a possibly starling, and we think the larger striped-looking ones belong to the owls.

We researched the Great Horned Owls on AllAboutBirds and WhatBird, as well as reading the story about them in the Burgess Bird Book (Chapter 45- Peter Sees Two Terrible Feathered hunters). The kids also decided to do a journal page, and they included a poem I found online:

SILENCE is a great
horned owl on a hunt.

Its deadly talons
on a branch, eyes
watching for prey
and then flies away.

We also watched a few youtube videos, the one my kids liked the best was of a Great Horned Owl being harassed by crows. Which made today's experience all the more interesting- as we were outside doing yard work (or playing with friends) a couple crows ventured into our neighborhood. We have many bird nests in our neighborhood- mourning doves, robins, starlings, & house finches- so it wasn't a surprise to see a group of birds working together to try to drive the crows away. In the picture below the crow is on the middle house, on the lower left edge of the far side of the roof. I hope you can click on it to see it better. Above it there are several birds who were diving at the crow.

In this video you can see the birds diving at the crow, and then my kids deciding to join in driving it away when I point out what is happening. Later when we were talking about it, they remembered reading about crows in the Burgess Bird Book (Ch. 17 More Robbers & Ch. 18 Some Homes in the Green Forest), where someone's eggs are taken by Blacky the Crow.

On a nature walk we took earlier this week by the river, we Came across a whole row of Barn Swallow nests. We watched the birds flying in and out with food for their young, and played in the water of course.

Video of the Barn Swallows

On a sadder note, the kids and friends came across a baby black-billed magpie who wasn't in its nest and who couldn't fly during our homeschool group park day. By the time I discovered what was going on the kids had moved it away from where they found it, half-a-dozen of them had held it or touched it, and they were trying to decide what they should do with it. Because it wasn't injured, I managed to convinve them that the best plan would be to return it to where they found it and leave it alone, which they willing did. Unfortunately, we later learned someone felt compelled to take it home and as a result it died. There was no guarantee the bird would have survived if left at the park, but I believe it would have a greater chance of surviving. This prompted a discussion in our family about what to do when you find/catch a wild bird (or any animal). Here is a great site that covers what we discussed: BirdingGuide- Bird Advice.

We have greatly enjoyed our break from school, but we are looking forward to our relaxed summer plans, which will mainly be our nature studies and reading great books.

Summer Plans

Many people have been asking me if we do school in the summer, and the answer is yes, though not as extensively as during the school year. We have taken a couple weeks off, but are ready to get started again. Here are some of our summer plans:

We will continue to do Math, mostly because we have a few chapters left to finish off, but also so we don't have to do any major reviewing in the Fall.

The kids usually read in some way every day so I won't be requiring anything more for this.

I try to have a story playing in the car so they don't bug me about watching a movie when we are driving down the street and so they don't fight with each other-- sometimes it works. We are listening to The Black Stallion right now.

We will continue our Composer Study and Artist Study. We are currently doing Johann Sebastian Bach and Claude Monet, and these are pretty easy-- listening, looking, and reading a few books.

We will continue our Nature Study following The Handbook of Nature Study challenges, but also learning about things we discover on our own.

Our major summer project will be reading The Chronicles of Narnia. We have read some before, but we are going to be reading them all, in the order that C.S. Lewis wanted them to be read, as opposed to the order they were written or published in:

The Magician's Nephew

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

The Horse and His Boy

Prince Caspian

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

The Silver Chair

The Last Battle

This is according to Beyond the Wardrobe: The Official Guide to Narnia by E.J. Kirk, which we grabbed at the library this past week. There are TONS of online websites, resources, activities, projects associated with the books and the movies, but I want to keep things simple. We will be doing a poster-size timeline, and I suspect that I'm the one who will be primarily interested in this-- nerd that I am--I want to see the big picture. There are several websites that have already done this, so I won't have to do any research other than flexing my Google-muscles.

I'm also thinking we will do maps with the books, maybe just one big one for us to mark where events take place or the routes traveled, but it depends on what I can find. By searching through Yahoo!Images I have found maps for Narnia, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and the Silver Chair, but so far I haven't found a single map with it all together. I'll probably just mush it all together somehow. And we'll do some narrating- the kids retelling me the part of the story they have just heard- Who's, What's, Where's, When's and Why's.

Here are some useful links:

This Old Schoolhouse Unit Study

Home School Mom Resources

Coloring Pages

Activity Pages

Walden Media- search "Narnia Educator's Guide"

Fan Sites:

The Lions Call

Narnia Fans

The kids will also be doing a summer camp at the Wheeler Historic Farm, 1/2 a day for a week.

And OF COURSE lots of time outdoors- doing yard work, playing at the parks, swimming in the pool, running around the neighborhood, digging in the dirt, slipping on the slip-n-slide, making mud pies, chasing birds and dogs, and whatever else they can think of (such as trading pokemon cards with their friends)!!!!!

We LOVE Birds!!

Outdoor Hour Challenge - Birds: Hummingbirds and House Sparrow, House Wren, and Mourning Dove

We have had a fascinating and exciting couple of weeks watching birds in our neighborhood.

We hung up our hummingbird feeders . . .

. . . and the same day we were visited by a male Black Chinned Hummingbird. In the picture below he is sitting at the top of the green-leafed tree. It isn't a very good shot of him, but considering his speed, and the noise of my 3 older kids clamoring to get a look, I feel lucky to have been able to take this shot.

We have seen him every day since this first day. This morning he put on quite a show for my 2 year old and I- darting, zooming, chirping, wings humming as he flew over and over in a big U-shaped pattern, and then he took a moments to chase off a rival before visiting the feeders.

For this weeks challenge we read from the Handbook of Nature Study and the Burgess Bird Book. I had the kids color pictures of the Song Sparrow.

Nyah-

Austin (who didn't feel like coloring)-

We have been watching Mourning Doves feed in our backyard. This is where seeds from the feeder on our deck drop into the grass. We also learned about Mourning Doves a couple weeks ago when we first spotted them in our yard.

I decided to move our feeder this week after surprising a neighborhood cat on our deck several mornings in a row. She was somewhat hidden by the plants and patiently waiting for an unsuspecting bird. Now the feeder is in a place where there isn't any cover for the cat.

Out on a nature walk Our mystery bird- This past Saturday my son and I were in the backyard doing yard work when we noticed a lot of bird noises, specifically baby birds chirping for their parents. After a little investigating we discovered where the noise was coming from- our neighbor's house. The birds have their nests in a small opening between the roof and the decorative block of wood, just below where the bird is sitting in this picture.

This video shows a parent bird going into the nest with a bug in its beak.

We can tell many of the houses in our neighborhood are being used for bird nests- comings and going of parents, lots of frantic baby bird calling, and bird pooh decorate these houses. I felt like a bird-nerd when one of my neighbors (in a friendly sort of way) accused me of attracting the birds to our neighborhood, and all I could think was that it seems to have more to do with an ideal nest location, especially after observing the parents collecting bugs (and not seeds) for themselves and their babies.

But I am having a hard time identifying these birds! They are black, with a green iridescent color to their wings. Their under-bodies are black/dark brown. They have a yellow beak, a little shorter than their head and used for catching bugs. They do not eat at our bird feeders, but we have seen them carrying bugs back to their nests. They are similar in size and shape to Robins. Some of the incorrect search results I have gotten at WhatBird is the purple martin (no purple, yellow beak), the barn sparrow (under-body too dark, yellow beak), and the cowbird (yellow beak, beak not a cone shape, greenish color, not as big). Any ideas?

UPDATE: Thanks to Barb for helping me out! The birds we have been watching are European Starlings, with their breeding feathers. Some of my searches at WhatBird came up with the European Starling, but the pictures show their nonbreeding look, which kept throwing me off! The All About Birds website has pictures of both looks.

The highlight of our birding adventures - Observing 2 adult owls while on our nature walk. You can click on the picture to get a better look at these beautiful birds.

I was pointing out a couple black-billed magpies in the background, and my 6 year old daughter said, "The owl?" and I of course said "No, they aren't owls, they are magpies" and went on talking about them, before my son joined his sister in pointing out the owl, and I realized that they were talking about something completely different. At first I thought it was just part of the tree, and it wasn't until one moved, and the second one fluttered up beside it that I realized it wasn't a tree branch at all, and there really was an owl! In my defense it is time to update my contact prescription. I believe these are Great Horned Owls.

Daisy

Wednesday Flower Study - Daisy

The Field Daisy

I'm a pretty little thing,

Always coming with the spring;

In the meadows green I'm found,

Peeping just above the ground,

And my stalk is cover'd flat

With a white and yellow hat.

Little Mary, when you pass

Lightly o'er the tender grass,

Skip about, but do not tread

On my bright but lowly head,

For I always seem to say,

"Surely winter's gone away."

Ann Taylor

Austin-

Nyah-
We are seeing plenty of these beautiful, happy flowers on our walks.

Flower People!!

We recently read a picture book that is a family favorite- Cinderlilly: A Floral Fairy Tale by David Ellwand. This book is a retelling of Cinderella using people made out of flower parts, and one reason it is a favorite is because we like to make our own flower people! The author of the book used a computer to create his pictures, but I think we had lots of more fun making ours with the real thing!

My daughter enjoyed picking the flowers, especially when I said she could pick any that she wanted, and not just the ones that were wilting.

The ones on red are my daughters and the ones on black are my sons.

My Favorite!

My Favorite!

In other family floral news, our Christmas cactus is blooming again- a wonderful surprise!

And we are getting ready to plant in our yard!! YEAH!!