Before we got starting on making our bird callers, we learned some neat facts about birds and their calls and songs. I used this activity to talk about some of the differences and to give the kids some facts about birds before playing a game with them: Bird Song Hero.
Cornell Lab of Ornithology has lots of great resources including this fun game that shows on a spectrogram what a bird's song looks like. We went through the tutorial together and then I got out my handy-dandy "Easy button" from staples to set up a Family Feud style game where the kids had to guess which bird call they were hearing. Loads of fun!
I was looking for a simple and inexpensive bird-caller project to do with the group because our big project this month was making a bird house, which was destined to cost a little more for a decent project. I considered buying these from Amazon, but I settled on making this quail caller with the kids. It only requires a few simple materials and seemed to work pretty well.
MATERIALS
1 Clothes Pin
1 Sized 33 Rubber Band
Electrical tape
Here is the tutorial we used
Cornell Lab of Ornithology has lots of great resources including this fun game that shows on a spectrogram what a bird's song looks like. We went through the tutorial together and then I got out my handy-dandy "Easy button" from staples to set up a Family Feud style game where the kids had to guess which bird call they were hearing. Loads of fun!
I was looking for a simple and inexpensive bird-caller project to do with the group because our big project this month was making a bird house, which was destined to cost a little more for a decent project. I considered buying these from Amazon, but I settled on making this quail caller with the kids. It only requires a few simple materials and seemed to work pretty well.
MATERIALS
1 Clothes Pin
1 Sized 33 Rubber Band
Electrical tape
Here is the tutorial we used
Most of the kids got them to work (some required tinkering). It was a good project and the kids all had fun making the quail sounds. For more about bird songs, Cornell also has this neat interactive tool where kids can see different kinds of birds and listen to their songs.