A night owl by nature, I can see that bird watching with children is going to turn me into an early riser.
My daughter and husband are both up at the crack of dawn seven days a week. Although lately I’ve been waking early, it’s so I can enjoy some quiet time by myself to get ready for the busy day. They’re ready to roll right away, talking and playing and reading together as early as six, even on the weekends. If we’re going to continue this family activity, we might end up synching our schedules a bit more on the weekends to start our bird counts earlier in the day.
On this slow-moving Sunday morning when I emerged from the bedroom around 7:45, a feeding frenzy was happening outside my dining room window. It makes sense that generally, birds would be active in the hours after sunrise. They’ve just awakened, are ready to find food, and their food sources are active. Watching with my daughter, we saw all kinds of male and female cardinals and a Blue Jay. Birds flocked all over the feeder, and I watched them during breakfast with an eye toward learning to identify common species.
For Project FeederWatch data to be accurate, you only count birds during your time spent actively watching the feeder for your count, not distractedly doing other things. Since I was also wandering around the house cleaning up the table, saying good morning to everyone, and fixing breakfast, none of those randomly sighted early birds made it into our actual count. By the time we were ready to sit down together and watch the feeder for day two of our two-day bird count around 9:30, they were done eating and so our count for today ended up as zero. Since data accuracy is critical, that in itself is science knowledge for your children or students. If they didn’t see any birds or butterflies or ladybugs or frogs or whatever it is you’re watching that day, young citizen scientists can quickly learn to write down zero and that their data is an important piece of the puzzle. They’re also learning that patience and persistence are critical skills when seeking wildlife encounters, especially in career paths working with wildlife.
And when Emma and Jake are ready to go on their first nighttime owling adventure, their night owl mom will be ready.
