Santa Cruz Friends

On Thursday, we went up into the Santa Cruz mountains to visit Bonny Doon Elementary. Darrow used to live in that area so it was great to be back home! The school buildings are mixed in amongst tall redwoods and we got to teach in the ideal redwood weather--fog! We worked with our friend Kate  Sommer, who is the LifeLab teacher at the school. LifeLab is an incredible organization that has put gardens in many of the schools in Santa Cruz county and the gardens provide great bird habitat. Students from various grades come to Kate throughout the day for science and garden education. In one day we got to work with every grade between kindergarten and 6th grade! It was great to work with such a wide range of students and experiment with our personal teaching methods. 

Listening in the garden

We began with the younger students and worked on listening, quiet observation, and learned how different habitats can have different birds. We got to watch the chickens in the garden for a bit. Who knew you could learn so much about birds just from watching domestic chickens?

What birds can you hear or see right now?

After lunch, we began working with the older students at the school. They knew a surprising amount about the birds on their campus already. In particular, the students knew all about the Acorn Woodpeckers that they have observed creating an acorn granary in some redwood trees near the school entrance. Good eyes! We were able to help them develop a sense for describing bird sounds and turn them on to ebird.org so they can contribute their observations to citizen science.

Our bird ID and diet lesson for the older students

Checking out the Acorn Woodpecker granary.

Checking out Stellar's Jays in the redwoods!

I hear a bird, but in which direction?

It's hard being a California Quail, hiding from potential predators.

We left Bonny Doon hoping our time spent with the classes will carry over to their studies of watersheds this Spring. Good birding!

This is How Beautiful a Thank You Can Be and The Bird School Project Reaches 500 Students!

Our time in Santa Cruz has been filled with visits with old friends and with some of our favorite birding spots. On Monday, we visited Main Street Elementary. A friend of a friend--Ilana Lowe--teaches 5th grade. She has her students keep nature journals and visit sit spots (nature observation spots) so these students were ready to learn more about birds on their schoolyard. We had a class of 25 students and got some wonderful close-up views of Black Phoebes, White-Crowned Sparrows, and Western Scrub-Jays. 

One helpful observation was that we had the chance to observe both the Black Phoebe and the Say's Phoebe.  We rarely get to see both of these birds during the same walk even though they are both common in coastal California. They are both in the genus Sayornis which means they are as closely related as one can get without being of the same species. Check out the differences and similarities below!

Black Phoebe

Say's Phoebe

Thank You Kevin!

We recently received some thank you notes from the Redwood Day School that we visited back in Oakland. We have received thank you notes from several schools now but we thought it would be good to show everyone how amazing these notes and drawings are. These students really spent some time on these and were are extremely grateful for their appreciation of our work. 

Thank You Darrow!

Thank you card from Redwood Day School kindergartners!

Today, we worked with two 3rd grade classes from The Gateway School. This school is down the street from where we used to live in Santa Cruz so we were working with a habitat we know well. The students got to meet the birds in the classroom and then we all went out to look for birds. We explored their LifeLab garden for wintering sparrows, blackbirds, starlings, and hummingbirds. We then continued to the adjacent Lighthouse Field Park where we got good looks at California Towhees and the beautiful bright, yellow Townsend's Warblers. Finally, we made it down the street to the ocean and got to have our first ocean birding session with students! We got to see pelicans, cormorants, gulls, terns, grebes, and surf scoters (a personal favorite...look it up!). The coast is amazingly rich with bird life!

Birding and taking notes on West Cliff

The Gateway School is in our old neighborhood!

Students at Main Street Elementary birding the schoolyard

Learning birds in the best place--outside!

Kevin and his group identifying Golden-Crowned Sparrows

Check out the sparrow over there!

Finally, The Bird School Project officially reached its 500th student today! We are super thankful for all of the opportunities that led to this and we hope to work with another 500 before we finish in December!