Goldfinch & Western Meadowlark

Yellow birds. Yellow is JD Boy’s favorite color. It was his favorite even before he could talk. I was so amazed that a little guy would prefer a color so early in life. Anyway, as you might guess, he enjoyed our study about two yellow birds–the American Goldfinch and the Western Meadowlark.

American Goldfinch

We enjoyed learning about the American Goldfinch. We rarely have them visit our feeders. We’ve always been wondering why they avoid us and we still don’t have it figured out, especially now that we learned that it is our state bird. Maybe they don’t like all the trees around our house. All in all, because of our travels during the last couple of weeks, we did get to have a few really good sightings of the Goldfinch. (And in our state, so we believe that they chose a state bird that actually likes it here.)

Another of my husband’s bird pictures from the last couple of weeks. Could be the same bird that we saw in all of our sightings, since they all occurred at Grandpa and Grandma’s house.

Zippy’s drawing of the Goldfinch for her Nature Journal

JD Boy’s coloring of the Goldfinch. He decided that I want him to draw too much. He really enjoys drawing, but he’s only six, so I decided that I didn’t want to make him hate drawing by pushing  it too much. Instead, we printed off a coloring page from the free Cornell Bird Coloring Book and cut it out and pasted it in his journal.

Western Meadowlark

We were afraid that we weren’t going to get to take any pictures of Meadowlarks. They don’t like our place either. It’s definitely too wooded for them around our house. So I was quite happy that when we stopped at a rest stop I could hear one singing. So I grabbed the kids and we went searching to see if we could see the Meadowlark. Zippy didn’t even have it on her life list of birds yet. We did find it, but it would only show us its back. I knew we were seeing the Meadowlark though, so she added it to her list, but I wanted her to see it well enough to identify it herself. I’m happy to say that yesterday, while we were driving, we looked over and there was one on a fence post. We immediately pulled over and all three of the kids could see it good enough to identify it. (Even my three year old is getting pretty good at identifying birds, so we showed him too.) I wanted a picture so bad, so my husband grabbed his camera and took one, but it was just a small dot on the ground where it had flown too. Sometimes I’m determined, (Sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s not.) so when it flew closer to another road, we backed up the entrance ramp to the highway (fortunately there was not other traffic) and were able to get a couple of shots. I’m happy now. They might not be gold medal pictures, but you can still identify the bird, and I’m happy.

Western Meadowlark in flight.

Western Meadowlark perched.

Western Meadowlark nature journal drawing by JD Boy, age 6.

Western Meadowlark nature journal drawing by Zippy, age 9.

Now we’re working to see if we can learn to whistle the song of the Western Meadowlark. We have a ways to go though before any of us can fool anybody!