When thinking about subjects for my daughter to take this year for her homeschooling, I never thought of bird identification. It wasn’t until after visiting her grandfather that our daughter announced that she wanted a bird feeder so that she could take a class to learn more about the birds in our yard.
As a home school mom, I could not let that opportunity for a school subject go to waste. Plus, it has been a lot of fun seeing so many different kinds of birds and identifying them.
First, we needed to get a bird feeder:
Any, regular bird feeder works wonderfully. This one was so cute, that we decided to go with it. I will add that some birds require special bird feeders. Such as woodpeckers. I haven’t researched this, but according to my dad Baltimore Orioles love grape jelly. I don’t know what kind of bird feeder is needed to be able to serve them grape jelly, but I’m sure there is a special bird feeder for that.
Since we are just getting started, we went with a basic, all around bird feed.
One of the biggest problems we had off the bat was taking pictures. My phone is a cheap one with not a very good camera and a zoom not worth much at all. Behold:
That is a picture of an American Goldfinch, which was pretty exciting for the first visitor.
One fun way we discovered to be able to take better pictures with a crappy phone camera is by holding the phone up against a pair of binoculars. Like so:
These are pictures of male and female Cardinals as well as House Sparrows. Using a binoculars does make for a cool looking picture. However, in the end we pulled out my old camera and let our daughter have at it with taking pictures of the birds.
Hopefully we’ll be posting soon about woodpeckers and Baltimore Orioles. Now, I must go out and get some grape jelly.