Black Birds

I’m behind in my blogging again. We studied this a week or two ago and I’m just now posting. Hope you enjoy it anyway! This is from the Outdoor Hour Challenge: Birds-Crow, Red-Winged Blackbird, Starling, and Cowbird

We went on a search for blackbirds of every type and this is what we got to see: American Crow, Common Raven, Red-Winged Blackbird, Yellow-headed Blackbird, Brewers Blackbird, Common Grackle, European Starling and Brown-headed Cowbird and a Magpie. (Not sure if a Magpie is in the same category though.) We are going to have to go do some more searching for Crows, because we found out that according to some bird books and not according to others, we may have two species of Crows in our area: the American Crow and the Northwestern Crow. I don’t much know the difference. I actually just discovered this a couple of days ago. I just assumed that crows were crows, but now I know that’s not always the case.

We weren’t able to get pictures of every single one of these, but I managed to pull a few together, although they aren’t all from the same outing.

Yellow-headed Blackbird

Red-Winged Blackbird

UPDATE: I was looking through some more of our pictures and found another Red-winged Blackbird picture that I just love and had to add. Here it is:

Black-billed Magpie

Brewer’s Blackbird

The kids also added some nature journal entries.

Red-winged Blackbird by JD Boy (age 6)

Red-winged Blackbird by Zippy (age 9)

Yellow-headed Blackbird by Zippy (age 9)

We picked up another excellent book about birds. I love it even more than the kids do. It’s Field Trips: Bug Hunting, Animal Tracking, Bird-watching, Shore Walking by Jim Arnosky. We’ve been reading the section on Bird-watching. We learned a new bird-word from this book–Mantling. It means when a bird spreads out its wings on the ground, usually a sign of aggression.

The challenge also encouraged us to learn about bird eyes and ears. We found a most interesting post on Wikipedia about Bird Vision. Check it out, if you’re interested in the subject.