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Connecting Students to Bird Conservation

November 17, 2021 By Blake Goll

By Caitlin Welsh

The bird banding net lanes at Rushton Farm. Photo by Blake Goll/Staff

Since I was introduced to Willistown Conservation Trust in 2015, it has been a privilege to spend many of my working hours in the field supporting the bird banding program at Rushton.  The time spent walking the net lanes and watching the seasons change over the last two years in particular has made it much easier to stay grounded during a time when it was often easy to find oneself feeling adrift. 

As an educator who primarily engages the public in natural settings, it was especially challenging to connect with our audiences, particularly K-12 teachers and students. However, if there’s one lesson to be learned from the challenges presented by the pandemic, it’s the importance of meeting and engaging with others where they’re at, which is an intrinsic part of good educators’ practice.

I had the fortune to connect with a group of such educators who dedicated time during the pandemic to exploring ways we could help them and their students connect with the natural world.  AIM Academy is a K-12 research-to-practice school in Conshohocken, PA that strives to support students who learn differently, often by using project-based learning strategies and emphasizing 21st century skills.  With students returning to the classroom, Alicia DeVane, Julia Bower, and Cherica Onyango – AIM Academy’s 8th grade science team – were eager to find ways to immerse students in social emotional learning through science education.

  • Ken Leister, County Coordinator for Bluebird Society of PA, and educator Caitlin Welsh at AIM Academy for the bird box building project.
  • The Mobile STEAM Lab truck at AIM Academy

We focused on introducing students to migration ecology with an emphasis on bird-human interactions to help students foster personal connections to local wildlife. Over the course of two weeks, students completed a learning module in which they were able to engage with educators both virtually and in the classroom through presentations, birding on AIM’s campus, and migration mapping activities from Birds Canada that use Motus wildlife tracking data. 

The experience culminated in a project that guided students to creatively promote human behaviors that can support bird conservation, like designing and installing decals to reduce window strikes around the school building, and recording PSAs about preventing interactions between birds and domestic cats.  Activities and other learning resources, as well as an overview of this and other experiences, can be explored in the Educational Opportunities section of the Northeast Motus Collaboration’s web page.

Seeing the ease with which students could activate their empathy through creative pursuits, we were then connected with Kathy Brandon who leads AIM’s Middle School STEAM program where students incorporate art and design principles into STEM disciplines. With the 2021 school year and field season in full swing, Blake Goll, the Trust’s Education Manager, and I took a break from the banding station to work with Kathy’s students and spread the message of bird conservation even farther than the AIM community.

After learning about the Trust’s bird banding program and our work to address the challenges faced by migratory birds due to habitat loss, students had the opportunity to build nest boxes for Eastern bluebirds with guidance from the Trust’s bluebird champion, Ken Leister.  

After building the nest boxes, Kathy plans to mobilize her program and connect with community partners at St. James School, a tuition-free school for underserved student populations in North Philadelphia. Following the AIM’s mission to seek equity and access for all to STEAM Education, Kathy will use AIM’s Mobile STEAM Lab to share cross-curricular learning experiences like the nest box project with St. James Schools’ students and community.  “I really appreciate our collaboration,” Kathy said. “Maybe one bird box at a time we can make a difference for our environment”.

  • Ken Leister and Caitlin Welsh facilitating bird box building with AIM Academy students.
  • Kathy Brandon assisting her students with bird box building.
  • The finished bird boxes!

Filed Under: Bird Banding, Bird Conservation, Education Tagged With: AIM Academy, Bird boxes, Bird Conservation, environmental education

Bird Boxes: Windows into the Lives of Birds, the Mysteries of Nature and the Joy of Conservation

January 10, 2014 By Communications Team

Eastern Bluebird.  Photo by Mike Rosengarten
Eastern Bluebird. Photo by Mike Rosengarten

WAIT! If you’re a subscriber reading this in email format, before reading any further, please click on the title of the post right above in order to view the blog in the glory it was meant to have on the actual blog website.
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One of last year’s accomplishments we are proud of is the initiation and success of our new Homeowner Bird Box Program.  The following is an article I wrote about it and the joys of bird box ownership.  If you don’t already have bird boxes in your yard, I encourage you to put one up this spring!  Better yet,  put it up now and you might get a Downy Woodpecker or a bunch of bluebirds roosting in it during these cold winter nights.

It was late March as I stood in front of the porch door, gazing out at the bustling bird feeders set up buffet-style on the railing of our deck.   Finches, chickadees, titmice, blue jays, cardinals and wrens were contentedly stuffing their little beaks full of hulled sunflower seeds on this blustery, wintery spring day.  As I did every day that winter, I was wistfully waiting for “someone in particular” to appear in front of me at the window feeder stocked with dried mealworms and insect-filled suet balls.  My gaze drifted off for a minute until I heard a familiar ‘tap’ on the window as the weight of a bird landed briskly on the feeder.

There before my eyes was the most beautiful deep Mediterranean blue surrounding a round red breast under an inquisitive cocked head peering at me through the class.   “They don’t call it the bluebird of happiness for nothing,” I thought as my heart skipped that familiar beat.  As he grabbed a dried worm and shot me one last suspicious look before fluttering off, I couldn’t help but notice a twinkle in his eye.

I raced out into the backyard to check the status of our new bluebird box, and sure enough, there he was – and there SHE was- proudly perched on top of the box of which the pair had taken ownership.   My spirit took wing with elation and anticipation of the joys that would be mine as guardian of this bird box throughout the coming season!

The thrills of bird box ownership are indeed abundant, as the forty participants in the Willistown Conservation Trust’s (WCT) Homeowner Bird Box Program discovered last year.  Through this new program, homeowners were able to advance bird conservation in their own yards by maintaining and monitoring bird boxes that were installed in early spring by a team of WCT bird box experts.  The teams visited the properties in the Willistown area, assessed the habitat, offered advice on which particular species of birds could be attracted to that available habitat, and placed the boxes for optimum probability of birds using them.

The WCT experts remained in contact with the homeowners throughout the remainder of the breeding season in order to track the success of the 113 bird boxes that were installed throughout the greater Willistown area.  Many of the boxes provided the homeowners with great enjoyment as they and their children watched families of bluebirds, house wrens, chickadees, tree swallows, and kestrels fly in and out of the boxes hundreds of times a day feeding their ravenous nestlings.

Children monitoring a nestbox at Rushton Farm.  Photo by Gloria Ives.
Children monitoring a nestbox at Rushton Farm. Photo by Gloria Ives.

Some were lucky enough to witness the fledging, when the young take their first staggering flight out of the box and into the world!  There is no better bond formed with nature than when a child gently opens a bird box and has his first peek at a bunch of exquisitely speckled little eggs or tiny baby birds, their wobbly necks outstretched and beaks gaping wide with expectation.

Speckled eggs.  Photo by Blake Goll.
Speckled eggs. Photo by Blake Goll.

Bluebird Nestlings.  Photo by Blake Goll
Bluebird Nestlings. Photo by Blake Goll

Each species of bird has specific habitat requirements, but sometimes the motto, “if you build it, they will come,” applies in even marginal habitat.  One of the homeowners blew the WCT experts away when she called and exclaimed excitedly, “I have bluebirds!!”

Bluebird Chicks.  Photo by Susan Butterworth
Banded Bluebird Chicks. Photo by Susan Butterworth

She bought a bluebird box but was admonished not to expect bluebirds because she did not have a big enough grassy area in her wooded backyard to suit their ideal habitat needs.  Consequently, the bird box experts expected to hear that she had one of the other usual occupants like chickadees or wrens.  Not only did the bluebirds take up residence in her “less-than-ideal habitat,” but they successfully fledged two broods of young from that box that summer!

Backyard habitat and bird box.  Photo by Susan Butterworth
Backyard habitat and bird box. Photo by Susan Butterworth.              Unmowed areas are ecologically valuable to wildlife and can look attractive with mowed paths.

In addition to connecting homeowners to nature, bird boxes also serve as essential conservation tools by providing vital habitat to cavity-nesting birds, many of which are declining.  Eastern Bluebird populations in Pennsylvania, for example, were down by 90% in the mid-1900s as a result of habitat loss, pesticides, and competitive invasive species like House Sparrows and European Starlings.

Today, our bluebird has recovered because of closely monitored nest boxes that are safeguarded against invasive competition.  However, it is still threatened, like many other insect-eating birds, by pesticide use on lawns and agricultural lands.  There are a host of other serious pressures facing our birds today: from feral and house cats killing 3 billion birds annually in the U.S. alone to window collisions killing up to 1 billion birds annually.  It’s no wonder we’ve lost half of the birds that filled the skies just 40 years ago.

Dick Eales, the Chair of WCT’s Bird Conservation Committee, was the go-getter who dreamt up this addition to WCT’s outreach activities in order to benefit as many birds as possible.  Additionally ,the Bird Box Program helps engage more people in conservation and provides the opportunity to raise awareness about the need to not only protect the natural areas we have left, but to begin to see our yards as habitat.

When people understand that conservation can happen in their own backyards, suddenly that long awaited bluebird of happiness taps on the window.

Blake

Visit nestwatch.org to learn about nests and get involved with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s citizen science project.

House wren nest and eggs.  A Downy woodpecker feather adds an enchanting touch to the nest decor.  Photo by Blake Goll
House wren nest and eggs. A Downy woodpecker feather adds an enchanting touch to the nest decor. Photo by Blake Goll

Filed Under: Bird Banding, Bird Events Tagged With: backyard habitat, Bird boxes, Bluebird

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