2018 Georgia Youth Birding Competition

This weekend was the annual Georgia Youth Birding Competition. Our daughter has been following in her older brother’s footsteps. He competed for 10 years and last year he mentored some young kids in birding, including his 8 year old sister. It has been a particular joy to continue participating in the competition with another generation […]

Bird Garden wins at State!

Here are our two birding boys, with some of their favorite plush birds. They use these birds to memorize field marks and bird calls. I just have to share our exciting news! Our boys spent several months installing a Bird Garden in our side-yard. We were thrilled last spring when the project won first place […]

Resources for Birding with Children

  We enjoy all kinds of nature study, but we have a real love of birds. Two of my children are featured on Cornell Ornithology’s Celebrate Urban Birds website, and you can find out more about some of the things we have done in teaching these avid and accomplished birders in my post How we […]

Youth Birding Competition Results

Here is our schedule and what the kids identified at the YBC this year. S means they saw it, H means they heard it and B means both. The boys won their age group again this year, despite moving from Pre-elementary to Elementary. They took first place for number of species identified. They also raised […]

Youth Birding

  The Lord has been showering us with blessing after blessing this week! My middle boys participate every year in the Georgia Youth Birding Competition, an event in which children fan out all over the state and see how many bird species they can spot and identify during a 24 hour period. They and their […]

April birding in Georgia

Today we had two beautiful male Rose-breasted Grosbeaks at the feeders. I wonder where the females were? They stayed for a long time and we got to enjoy watching them. We also had two Pine Siskins, 2 Mourning Doves, a Tufted Titmouse, a Carolina Chickadee and a couple of unidentified sparrows. I was alone, and […]

Empowering Kids to Run with Their Ideas

We have been working on a large-scale project for the past year. Last year our two bird-watching boys were devastated when a builder destroyed the woods beside our home to make room for a new house. They were very concerned about the birds’ loss of habitat. They decided to remedy the situation by putting in […]

Finishing the Bird Garden

Our bird garden has turned out to be a much bigger project than we ever anticipated! We thought it would be done in a couple of months, but here we are, one year later, finally with an end in sight! It was too hot to work outside in the summer, so this has been primarily […]

Migration Pattern

We saw a huge flock come through our yard today. We got video this year, but I haven’t been able to view it yet to determine whether they were grackles or starlings or something else. It is raining and they were flying fast, not stopping long. I looked over my notes from last year and […]

Fruits of the Bird Garden

We’ve had so much success spotting birds this past week that we’ve been getting up before dawn almost every day to see what we can find in the yard. The boys have enjoyed lots of birding, finding old favorites and spotting some new finds, as well. We continue to marvel at how many more birds […]