BIRD STUDY: House Wren & Bird Beaks

Last week we were excited to kick off our collaborative bird study with two other families! We will be meeting twice a month and studying a featured bird each time, as well as exploring a general concept about birds (ex: beaks, feet, feathers, nests) with a STEAM project. We are referencing the Simple Studies curriculum and also supplementing the lessons with other ideas we find too. Our topics for this session were the house wren and bird beaks. To start the session, we reviewed basic bird anatomy and talked about the characteristics of birds such as making nests, laying eggs, having beaks and most importantly, having feathers! Feathers are the defining feature for birds, and we enjoyed reading a book called “What Makes a Bird A Bird” to highlight this.

The House Wren

Next up we learned about our featured bird, the house wren. I had a lot of fun learning about these fierce birds who sing lively songs and garnish their nest with snakeskin to keep predators away! We used picture cards to showcase some fun facts such as that baby wrens are sometimes fed 30 times in one hour!! House wrens are very flexible nesters too, willing to set up house in nearly any enclosed nook, whether that’s a drain pipe, an old boot or a nesting box. They are very territorial and will sometimes scare other birds away by pecking their eggs. They have a interesting nesting process too where the male sets up a number of featured nesting spots with twigs and then the female chooses her favorite to settle, often throwing most of his sticks out before “decorating” with hair, feathers, moss and other soft things. The wrens also add spider eggs because they eat mites in the nest when they hatch. I found this amusing because the spiders are essentially providing a cleaning service and buffet all in one for the clever wrens.

On the back of each card is a fun fact about house wrens so the kids can continue to review what they learn.

Bird Beaks

Our STEAM project for the day was all about how birds need different shapes and sizes of beaks to get the food they like. My friend set up an amazing hands-on activity for the kids to try out different sorts of “beaks” to see which “foods” they were most easily able to catch. She had a strainer, a tweezers, a rounded pair of tongs, a dropper and a set of more pointy tongs, as well as five replicas of food that the birds would eat. Each kid got one of the beaks and then we passed the food sample around to see which beak worked the best. After that we determined which bird the beak belonged to in the pictures.

The strainer beak quickly allowed the kids to pick up the pond plants without all the water.

The first round was a pond-like simulation with water and oregano and the kids were delighted to discover that the strainer beak was best for this because they were able to catch lots of food without much water just like a duck. Another top hit was a log that she drilled holes into and stuffed with pipe cleaner “worms” and golden raisin “grubs”. The kids determined that the fine tipped sharp tweezer beak was best for that just like the woodpecker. They also had a lot of fun with the dropper beak which was like a hummingbird’s straw-like beak and perfect for sipping nectar.

For easy reference, here’s the line-up of each beak, bird and food:

• chicken: broad rounded tongs beak for scooping up large insects quickly from the dirt // container full of plastic insects & dirt

• duck: strainer beak for nibbling pond plants and leaving behind the water and dirt // container full of water and oregano flakes

• hummingbird: dropper beak for sipping nectar // colored water

• woodpecker: sharp tweezer beak for poking holes into wood where the worms & grubs live // log with drilled holes that had pipe cleaners and golden raisins stuffed into them

• sparrow: angled/pointed tongs to easily pluck and hold seeds // a playdough flower replica with sunflower seeds

Here are the replicas of the bird food that each type of bird eats!

This was such an amazing way to demonstrate the form and function of beaks! She also read The Beak Book by Robin Page to review an even wider variety of bird beaks. Check out the gallery below to see more pictures of our day!