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!
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| Black Phoebe |
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| Say's Phoebe |
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| 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.
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| Thank You Darrow! |
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| 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!
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| Birding and taking notes on West Cliff |
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| The Gateway School is in our old neighborhood! |
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Students at Main Street Elementary birding
the schoolyard |
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| Learning birds in the best place--outside! |
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| Kevin and his group identifying Golden-Crowned Sparrows |
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| 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!
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