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I had no interest in birds until one of my toddlers showed a fascination for birds. If I have no excitement about a subject, it is difficult for me to teach. So I found someone who loved birds. I signed up for a night class that lasted about three nights with a field trip on the last Saturday. The professor showed slides and carefully explained the markings on each bird. Suddenly I realized that each bird opened its dry beak and chirped a different bird call. I became amazed at the different shapes of beaks (depending on what the bird eats) and the shape of its claws (depending on what the bird uses its claws for). A whole new world was open to me, all because of my toddler’s interest.

Now that I had a fire for it, I decided that the best way to teach it would be to color each bird correctly in a coloring book (since markings are how you identify birds). Ideally, I wanted only birds from our local area in that coloring book. That way we could color each one as we saw it. I asked the bird professor if he knew of such a thing. He said he would look into it, and he called me back two weeks later. Our National Fish and Wildlife office here in Washington had a coloring book for our local birds. I was ready to begin teaching.

Each day we chose one bird to color. We used Prismacolor colored pencils because of their smooth color, and there are many shades of each color. I colored my own coloring book first (the night before), looking at a bird identification book. Then I told them the exact colors I used, and they did a beautiful job. I read the description of each bird as they were coloring, including what each bird eats and the color of its eggs. I found stickers for my one-year-old to put on a stack of blue construction paper squares. I wrote the name of the bird below the sticker, and I laminated the cards with packing tape and put a ring through them so my little girl could identify birds on the go as well.

We went to the pet shop to look at birds close up. We also went on four different birding expeditions in our area, places that the professor had taken us on that Saturday field trip. By far the best birding expedition in the Spokane, Washington area was Davenport Cemetery, an hour away, at dusk. It seems to be a bird sanctuary. The children looked through their binoculars and identified many, many birds. Our favorite were the wild hoot owls, who were swiveling their heads and looking straight down on us with disdain, not even flying away!

The local Children’s Museum had a one-hour bird class. The children saw how water rolled off bird feathers, how feathers overlap, and how birds eat. We pretended to have long beaks with tweezers to get food out of narrow places. We looked at different kinds of bird nests, and we compared bird eggs. We even saw how a bird made a nest out of a telephone book! We carefully examined bird claws, and we saw a wide variety of feathers.

Nap time was never the same for my two older sons who would read by a window during the time the 3-year-old and one-year-old were taking a nap. They would burst into my bedroom, telling me how they’d seen a flicker up close, or a nuthatch for the first time. “And Mom! That beautiful goldfinch just ran into our window! Is it dead?” Never mind about all the times the children saw birds while they were playing outside, or while we were driving around in the car.

A baby robin was even learning to fly in our front yard. I sent the children, one by one, stealth-like, to go up close to it. That robin ended up hanging out in our backyard that summer as we watched it grow up. We made birdhouses, and a chickadee had chicks in one of them the following year. We put up bird feeders, including a hummingbird feeder, right up next to our window, and we saw beautiful hummingbirds. Whenever we went for a walk, we could hear the different bird calls and could identify the birds in the area, even when we couldn’t see them. My children were able to identify 35 different live birds during the course of these two summer months. When we went on a road trip to Tennessee years later, we saw different birds, like a red cardinal. It was so much more fun since we had already studied birds.