Birds field trip

To go along with our study of cardinals, we attended a field trip at Minnetrista in Muncie about birds.  After listening to bird calls, the kids disected an owl pellet.  Owl's eat live animals like rodents and such.  However, their bodies cannot digest all the animal they eat, so after the meat is consumed, they upchuck (for lack of a better word) the bones and fur of the animal.  this is called an owl pellet.  Now, it may sound disgusting (and for those of you who know Nicolas, he has a strong gag reflect and I was concerned), but she explained that the pellets were cleaned to get rid of germs and they were very dry.  Here are pictures of the boys disecting.

And here is what we found.  To the far left is the top part of the skull.  Aiming toward the bottom left are the long front teeth.  Next in line are the bottom parts of the jaw - you can also see the long teeth there.  Then the next pile is just miscellaneous bones.  She let them bring the bones home.

Then we talked about beaks of different birds and how they are used.  The first was a Robin and that their beaks are long to fint down into the ground for worms.  Here the boys are digging for 'worms' in oatmeal with chopsticks.

Then there was the birds that crack open nuts, like the Cardinal.  Here the boys are using a nutcracker.

Then there are birds that use their beaks to peck insects off of trees, like the woodpecker.  The boys used tweezers to pick rice off a log.

And finally there are hummingbirds that use their long beaks to get nectar out of flowers.  The boys used straws to get water out of a vase.

What a great learning experience.  This field trip went along great with our science also - Zoology, the study of flying creatures.  We were already discussing bird calls and field markings.

To finish the field trip, they kids walked around outside to listen for and look for birds.  We didn't see many, but it was a nice walk.