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Oswood: What's That Bird?
Take the kids outdoors! Get them started young!
© Gregg Thompson
On a scavenger hunt called What's That Bird?, kids and adults search for eight carved, life-like birds in their natural settings. A young birdwatcher might discover this Yellow Warbler. The hunt was created by educators at North Central Washington Audubon. Chapter President Mark Oswood says: "...this kid might turn out to be a graduate student doing ground-breaking work in ornithology and maybe, just maybe, it started there!" Find the Audubon chapter near you, and take your family on an adventure!
BirdNote®
Oswood: What’s That Bird?
Environmental Education in Action
Featuring Mark Oswood
Recorded by Adam Sedgley
This is BirdNote!
[Open with child saying “Umm, we found an American Kestrel, a Black-capped Chickadee, a Ruby-crowned Kinglet, and an American Goldfinch”
How did our young birdwatcher make her discoveries? Well, she went on a scavenger hunt created by educators at North Central Audubon in Washington State. In this hunt, called “What’s That Bird?” kids and adults look for eight carved, life-like birds that have been planted in vegetation where the birds would normally hang out. Chapter President Mark Oswood says:
“The amazing thing is that the bulk of the youngest kids find mostly all eight of ‘em… sometimes it’s the very youngest ones that the parents will be going ‘Yeh, yeh, well, we’ve got other things to do. Let’s go!’ And it’s the very youngest kids that will be going ‘No, no! I’m going to find all eight of these!’” “…And our hope, of course, is that for some fraction of them, that the birding part of it really sort of catches a little bit, that there’s a hook in there. And they’ll come back and go, ‘Where does this bird actually live?’ and ‘How would I know it if I saw it?’ and ‘What’s its call sound like and what’s it eat?’ That there’s this ripple effect… That somewhere fifteen or twenty years from now, this kid might turn out to be a graduate student doing ground-breaking work in ornithology and maybe, just maybe, it started there!”
Plant the seed for curiosity about birds and nature.
Adult: “Was that a thrush?”
Child: “No, Cedar Waxwing…See?...because it has the little red things on its wings.”
Find the Audubon chapter near you, and take your family on an adventure! Begin at our website BirdNote.org. I’m Mary McCann.
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Recorded by Adam Sedgley: T7, 0:02-0:12); T5 5:38; T8:18
Ambient recorded by Kessler Productions.
Producer: John Kessler
Executive Producer: Chris Peterson
© 2014 Tune In to Nature.org July 2014
ID# oswoodm-01-2009-07-16-MM
