This week’s nature detectives challenge was “which birds can you spot?” and also tied in with the RSPB’s Big Garden Birdwatch. I was hoping to make some pinecone bird feeders, but my parents didn’t end up visiting, and also bringing with them the giant pine cones I had asked for. Honestly, I can never find the right ones in our local forest. I must be looking in the wrong place. Anyway, hopefully we will get a chance to make them this weekend instead and we can do a little birdwatching in our own garden!
I had hoped to start off the activity by watching a programme on BBC iPlayer about birds, but there didn’t seem to be one available, that I could find and so we ended up watching Lost Land of the Volcano, which was actually pretty cool. I really like the fact that Lily seems to be old enough now, to enjoy watching nature programmes. I feel like it is something we can both sit down and enjoy together, and it makes for a nice starting point to talk about different animals and countries and as a set up for different craft activities.
Anyway, I digress… After a failed attempt at finding a relevant nature documentary, we sat down at the kitchen table and Lily chose which bird picture she wanted to paint with her plant based watercolours.
Here she is painting a Great Spotted Woodpecker. I ordered her the RSPB first book of birds, from our local library and we used this as a reference point for the painting.
Here she is checking out the picture of the woodpecker in the book, which is cunningly protected inside one of our A4 plastic zip bags.
Lily chose to paint an owl, woodpecker, blue tit and robin. None of which, we actually saw when we went out birdwatching at our local park!
We wandered around our local duck pond, as I knew we would definitely find some birds there! On the way down to the pond from the car park, we spotted:
- Magpie
- Woodpigeons
- Crow
- Gulls
Lily took a few pics of the birds and then we fed them some bread, before going on a loop around the pond.
We spotted:
Once we had made a loop of the pond, we set back down by the pond, where we originally fed the ducks and we had a look through the bird book, to see if we could identify the birds.
and then we chilled out a little bit more, just looking at all the birds…
Sounds like a nice day of bird watching!! 🙂 I did a little bird watching post this week too! Stop by to take a look if you have a moment! http://buzzmills.typepad.com/blog/2013/01/life-list-of-birds.html