Learn Bird Watching

Teaching environmental science has been my pleasure as a teacher. I often take my students out on field trips for educational purposes. I take a keen interest in observing birds. Teachers can teach their students to identify birds and take up bird watching as a hobby. Bird watching can be used an effective strategy to inculcate different scientific skills, such as observation, data collection, drawing of patterns, analysis of data, and other things, among students. It also helps in imparting the life skills of patience, empathy, and helps in nurturing curiosity among students.

The specifics of bird watching:

A bird enthusiast would say that birds are a wonderful group of organisms. Bird watching helps us build a knowledge repertoire pertaining to the sounds of the birds, their habitats, their breeding season, and other ecological behaviours of birds. Bird watchers can also choose to become photographers. It helps students become sharp, patient, observant, and intelligent. As for example, one of my students, Balaji, has been successful in starting an environment conservation foundation named OMCAR Foundation. They work for the conservation of sea cows (Dugong) in the Thanjavur district of Tamil Nadu.

Materials required for bird watching:

Binoculars, notebook, pen, guide books, camera (optional).

Teaching bird watching to children:

When taking students out on field trips, it is important to plan for the event and guide the students in a meticulous manner so that the learning can be rich and enjoyable. Bird watching depends a lot on the observational skills of a person, and, hence, it is important to communicate the “observables” with the students beforehand. Since the “field” is a very dynamic space, where most of the factors cannot be controlled unlike in a lab experiment, it is important to help students focus on these observables.

Given below are a few observables that can be communicated to the students.

1. Bird Calls: In bird watching, initially, we try to be silent so that we can hear the calls of birds, which allows us to identify a bird.
2. Special marks: While bird watching, students can identify a bird by their colour, the shape of their noses and their legs.
3. Flying patterns of birds: This differs from one bird to another. As for example, some birds, like the eagle, fly without gliding. Some other birds, like the Golden Backed Woodpecker, fly with the sound of their wings flapping.
4. Resting place of the bird: Birds can also be identified through the places where they rest, the environment in which they thrive, the trees/plants that they flock to.

It is important to remain silent while on the field, so that the birds and other organisms are not disturbed by us. This activity helped the students in developing proper attitude, team spirit, and interest towards watching the nature through a conservatory lens.

To help students identify the birds, the teacher has to provide them with suitable identifying guides.

A few examples of the observations and deductions made by the students have been listed in the following table.

Author: Rammanohar