 Bird Activities: Bird
Ecology/Become a Scientist
Bird
Ecology
Learn
about food chains and food webs
Hand out a diagram
of a food web. Have your students examine the food web, gather
in groups, and answer these questions. You could also have
students make their own "human" or model food webs, and use those to answer the
questions.
Bioaccumulation
game
Here's a game that can demonstrate how birds and other animals at the tops of food chains
are often the species most affected by poisons.
Play tag. A few students will
be "It" and will represent predatory birds (hawks, owls). The rest of the
students will be "Prey" (insects, fish, smaller birds).
Give each "Prey" student a
token or checker to hide in their hand or pocket. Start the students off mostly with
black, or "normal," tokens and increase the number of red, or
"poisoned," tokens as the game progresses.
When Prey are tagged, they give
their tokens to the Predator and can return to the game only after they get a new token
from you. Set a consumption rate for the Predators, or a certain number of times
they need to eat per minute.
When Predators get a certain number
(at your discretion) of red, or poisoned, tokens, they must "die" and leave the
game. Watch how this game will lead certain birds to ingest so much poison that they
become sick and die. This exercise parallels nature because birds have no way of
knowing which food sources are contaminated, and yet they have to eat.
Become a Scientist
Paper airplane experiment
-- Introduce the experimental method
Students conduct original research
Ornithology
conference/Poster session: Report your research results.
After students have written their papers, you may want to convene an Ornithology
Conference to give them a chance to present their findings.
Or have each student prepare a
poster (4' wide by 3' tall) that shows their research question, methods, results, and
analysis. Ask them to add graphics and other visuals to make the posters clear and
attractive. When the posters are all read, tape them to your classroom walls and
have students look at each others' posters. After the poster session, you might ask
students to write down summaries of five posters that they remember from the session.
Information on Writing a Scientific Paper may help
your students with these activity.
Create a classification
poster or taxonomic key
One of the things I have been able to do
more of this year is connecting Classroom FeederWatch with my regular class work. As
we studied classification -- scientific naming -- I assigned all students to research and
make a Classification Poster on one of the common feeder birds that have visited our site
over the last two years. They classified each into the Kingdom, Phylum, Class,
Order, Family, Genus, and Species in which it is placed.
Another connection I have been able to make
is our use of Taxonomic Keys. These are used often in my text. This year I was
able to test on students' skill by developing a taxonomic key for some of the common
feeder birds that visit our site. Starting with "Birds with a crest" or
"No crest." I ended up with a total of 8 of our bird species.
-- Jeff Prosseda, Bloomsburg Middle School, Bloomsburg, PA
Many of the ideas on this page were
sent to us by teachers and other educators. Send us your favorite activity idea:
Educator's Guide to Bird
Study
Cornell Lab of Ornithology
159 Sapsucker Woods Road
Ithaca, NY 14850
Email:baj3@cornell.edu
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