On Saturday, citizen science turned my kids and me into wildlife photographers.
After our first Project FeederWatch bird count, Emma and Jake were so excited about identifying the different bird species we saw that they wanted to know more. As a parent, that enthusiasm made me want to continue this work. We’re doing it for fun, but even more so, to spark an interest in science in a simple but memorable way.
After reading Jane Yolen’s gorgeous Owl Moon for school (one of my favorite children’s books and a Caldecott Medal winner for illustration), Emma’s been wanting to learn more about owls. She asked if we could go owling, and so as a first step in that direction we’ve been listening to calls and looking at pictures of the different kinds of owls. From the book and from the tiny brown house sparrows and other common feeder birds we saw this morning, Emma’s interest in birds started to grow until today she asked me if we could look at “beautiful birds.”
So after submitting our bird count for the day, I sat down with her and jumped on the Audobon Society’s Audobon Photography Winners pages and she was hooked. Take a look around and you’ll see why: these amateur and professional photographers have captured incredible action shots of birds around the world, from a bald eagle lifting both a fox and a rabbit into the air in its talons to the rare California condor. Emma’s favorites included Atlantic puffins, a Japanese Ural Owl, a Roseate Spoonbill, a Costa Rican Bare-Throated Tiger Heron, and an adorable baby Laysan Albatross. We even managed to impress a ten-year-old, with Jake stopping by to see what he was missing. If you’re a fifth grade teacher, then you know what an accomplishment that is.
They were still both so into it and we’d been cooped up so long due to the Covid-19 pandemic that we took a trip with dad just across the Kansas border to a nearby 400 acre lake, where we thought that even in the dead of winter we’d be likely to spot some wild birds. Sure enough, as we walked around the lake we saw ducks diving for prey and a ton of birds in the surrounding trees, attracted to the water. The kids brought along their toy digital camera and spent a long time photographing about three dozen Canadian geese swimming on the lake.
It was exactly what I had hoped for: a perfectly ordinary, extraordinary day that they’d recall later on in life and perhaps know in their bones a little more from the experience, “I can be a wildlife photographer,” “I can be an ornithologist,” or “I can be a wildlife biologist.” Or they might simply recognize their own deepest wish to become a parent, teacher, artist, or writer who loves the beauty of wildlife, the aliveness of being outdoors in nature, and the joy of sharing it with children.
