At our August retreat, the Board decided to implement a new series of articles in the Echo: each month we will highlight the work of a different committee. The purpose is to let you, our members, become familiar with the work that BHAS does. Much of this work is “behind the scenes” and relatively invisible. To start us off, we will report on the recent activity of the Education Committee.
As was the case for nearly everyone, the Education Committee’s work has been somewhat constrained during the past few years due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We could not, for example, go into classrooms and work face-to-face with children nor could we hold live adult education classes. However, despite these challenges we managed to find new ways to fulfill our mission to increase children’s and adults’ knowledge about birds and their place in the ecosystem.
Perhaps our most recent significant achievement was to enter into a partnership with North Thurston Public Schools, Capital Land Trust, and the South Sound Estuary Association. Beginning this coming spring we will be part of a district-wide, full-day outdoor STEM experience that will, over time, involve every third grader in the North Thurston Public School district. Named “Birds in the Woods”, our project will allow the students to go on a simulated bird walk. We located, purchased, and modified life-sized, realistic wooden bird models and developed talking points about each bird and we recruited a sufficient number of volunteers to lead the bird walks. The birds were to have been placed in Capitol Land Trust’s Inspiring Kids Preserve in April 2022, and last year approximately 270 3rd-graders from three schools were to have been led on a walk through deep forest where the birds would have been hidden. The plan was for the BHAS volunteer to play the appropriate bird song as the children neared a bird and talk to them about the bird’s lifestyle and adaptations to forest life.
Unfortunately, at the eleventh-hour, North Thurston Public Schools delayed the project until April 2023. (They were suffering from a bus driver shortage and could not arrange transportation for the students.) So, in lieu of the live walk, we developed and produced a ten-minute video of a simulated bird walk. This was shared with each of the teachers who would have participated. The video can be found at Birds of Inspiring Kids Preserve – Black Hills Audubon Society (blackhills-audubon.org). We received such positive feedback about the short video that we’ve decided to make more of them, tailored to the specific STEM goals at different grade levels. We hope to make the videos available to teachers in all our local school districts as well as to homeschooling parents.
In addition, we purchased and made available to teachers in every school district in our catchment area an hourlong video with accompanying curriculum called “Bird Flight Patterns and Music”. The video was produced by the New Bedford Symphony Orchestra, and it describes different flying styles (e.g., flap and glide, static soaring) and matches them to similar rhythms in classical pieces of music.
On the adult side of our mission, we offered three classes in 2021-2022: a new, one hour Introduction to eBird, taught by Bill Tweit; a new 3-part Washington Birds by Habitat class, taught by Kim Adelson; and a 4-part Beginning Birding class, also taught by Kim Adelson. Since these courses were online, they were easily accessible to persons in Lewis and Mason as well as Thurston counties.
Besides these classes, we offered numerous one-off lectures to multiple external groups such as other Audubon chapters, Master Gardener Societies, etc. Many of those talks involved how to create bird-friendly habitat and the effects of climate change on birds.
We would like to expand our efforts to reach children and adult learners in the coming year and it would be WONDERFUL if more people joined in and worked with us! We are looking for volunteers to:
- Participate in the outdoor “Birds in the Woods” project in April by leading or co-leading a bird walk. (Talking points will be provided so that it is not necessary to be an experienced birder.)
- Help make short videos about birds to be distributed to schools and homeschooling organizations. If you’d like to write a script, star in a video, film a video or edit a video we would love to hear from you.
- Teach an adult class. If you have expertise about a topic related to birds or birdwatching and like to make Zoom (or, later in the year, maybe live) presentations, this might be right up your alley.
- Set up and lead or co-lead a youth birding club.
If you’d like more information about any of these opportunities, please feel free to contact me (Kim Adelson) at education@nullblackhills-audubon.org.
Photo credit: Children/Environmental Education, by Nieminen Gene, USFWS. Public Domain.
