In the birding world, there is an event known to all birders as one of the ultimate (and slightly competitive) challenges--It is called a Big Day. Many times throughout the year, birders head out in the wee hours of the morning on a pre-determined day in search of the most amount of species that they can see in 24 hours. Records are set and broken as birding becomes more popular and as changing climate patterns bring birds to more unlikely regions year after year. In fact, a quartet of birders from Louisiana State University just broke the world record with finding 354 species in one day in Peru this past October! Check out their website, photos, and history of the Big Day at
http://www.lsubigday.org/#!documentary/ck0q

A birding Big Day could certainly be in store for the Bird School Project in the near future. But today, the Bird School project took on another type of Big Day--to teach the most amount of students possible in one school day. Our previous record was 80 students when we visited 2 schools in a single day in the bay area. On this past Monday, we shattered the record with 120 students. But today, we continued our impact with 200 students in one day!!!

We finished our time in Santa Cruz last week and taught on Monday and Tuesday this week in Salinas. We worked with the kindergartners and 1st graders at La Joya elementary school and then today at Gavilan View middle school. Thankfully, we have received assistance from Darrow's childhood friend and fellow UCSC alum--Benny Jacobs-Schwartz. Benny has worked with professional bird researchers on the east coast, the midwest, and even in Costa Rica. He has also worked with kids for the past three summers at Camp Tawonga as a nature educator and wilderness leader. He is a perfect addition to the bird school team for this week and has been a great help!

Benny working with kindergartners at La Joya

Perks of working at school--Chocolate milk!

Checking out the Song Sparrows and Horned Larks (!)

Getting down to notice the Black and white throat
bands of the Killdeer!

Taking notes on our observations

He was actually this excited to learn about the birds!

A sea of students

Working with these schools has been incredible. The schools are underfunded, the majority of students have free and reduced lunch, and at the same time, they are beyond thankful for our visit. They were attentive, asked great questions, and many asked us how they could get more involved. Things like, "this is actually pretty cool!", "I really like doing this!", and "I can do this for work?!" are simple yet powerful things to hear form these kids. The more we work with students, the more we are able to see our impact on students and see how important this is for students.

Tomorrow, we will begin working with Carmel middle school for the next three days. They have a 5 acre habitat dedicated to bird programming and nature education. We are looking forward to it and will report back soon!

On Thursday, we went up into the Santa Cruz mountains to visit Bonny Doon Elementary. Darrow used to live in that area so it was great to be back home! The school buildings are mixed in amongst tall redwoods and we got to teach in the ideal redwood weather--fog! We worked with our friend Kate Sommer, who is the LifeLab teacher at the school. LifeLab is an incredible organization that has put gardens in many of the schools in Santa Cruz county and the gardens provide great bird habitat. Students from various grades come to Kate throughout the day for science and garden education. In one day we got to work with every grade between kindergarten and 6th grade! It was great to work with such a wide range of students and experiment with our personal teaching methods.

Listening in the garden

We began with the younger students and worked on listening, quiet observation, and learned how different habitats can have different birds. We got to watch the chickens in the garden for a bit. Who knew you could learn so much about birds just from watching domestic chickens?

What birds can you hear or see right now?

After lunch, we began working with the older students at the school. They knew a surprising amount about the birds on their campus already. In particular, the students knew all about the Acorn Woodpeckers that they have observed creating an acorn granary in some redwood trees near the school entrance. Good eyes! We were able to help them develop a sense for describing bird sounds and turn them on to ebird.org so they can contribute their observations to citizen science.