Birding with kids

Birding with kids

      During summer of 2018, the American Birding Association podcast features two segments on birding with kids (May podcast July podcast).  The podcasts included great interviews with birding parents and/or bird trip leaders who offer bird walks for kids.  The speakers provided excellent advice, and I encourage all readers to check-out the podcasts.

      I, too, am a birding parent.  This post is 

What do you do when you take kids birding?

about some of my experiences of birding with kids.  

         First, a little background for context.  I've been a birder just about all my life.  When I got married, my spouse tolerated my birding, but she didn't get much enjoyment out of it herself.  So, when our kids were born, there was not a lot of natural socialization into a birding culture going on for the boys.  It wasn't easy to even maintain a bird feeder in the backyard or walk around our woods with binoculars looking for birds.  We ended up separating and getting divorced when the boys were about 9 and 12 years-old.

     Life as a birding parent post-divorce has looked very different than life as a birding parent pre-divorce, although in many ways, I was a single-parent birder in both of those lives.  Here are a couple of vignettes about birding with kids from each of those lives.

“My eyes know, but they can’t talk…”

Each year around my birthday in mid-March, my two young sons and I plan a trip around the Finger Lakes looking for signs of spring.  We especially try to find some of the big flocks of migrating waterfowl that pass through here in March.  A few years ago when my boys were 7 and 10, we started our day at the south end of Cayuga Lake where they enjoyed counting individuals of the species of birds they could identify.  One son estimated that he saw 15 mallards while the other counted over 50.  The actual numbers didn’t matter, just finding species they could recognize and getting in the habit of trying to estimate their numbers made it fun for me and them.  As morning wore into afternoon, we had driven north to Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge.  The boys were hanging in there, but I knew we’d have to head home soon before they got bored.  I was just hoping to find that one thing that would make it a day for them to remember.  Several miles north of the refuge, we found it – thousands upon thousands of Snow Geese.  We parked to watch the spectacle and both boys climbed atop the car for a better view.  For over a half an hour, we couldn’t even talk to each other over the din of goose talk as wave after wave of birds lifted off and continued north on migration.  Finally, when the last, small flocks were straggling overhead, I asked my boys how many Snow Geese they thought they had just seen so they could add them to their lists.  My 7-year old responded, “I don’t know.  My eyes know, but they can’t talk. So I can’t ask them.”  My eyes know something, too – that my sons were becoming birders.

Getting up close and personal with spectacular numbers of
             birds can excite birders of any age.

A moral of this story is that even young kids will tolerate a lot if there is some amount of fun, excitement, or even spectacle for them to experience.

Pride and confidence

               In the summer of 2015, my then 12- and 15-year olds accompanied me on a trip to the west coast.  I wanted them to experience the ecology, sights, and smells of a part of the country that is quite different from the humid, mixed broad-leaf ecosystems with which they were familiar in the northeastern U.S.  We took this trip when much of the West was deep into a multiple-year drought, and you might think it would be hard to find birding opportunities that would pique the kids’ interest.  However, agriculture reins supreme in California in terms of water use.  So, many of the agricultural fields were an irrigated oasis of green amidst a see of parched landscape.  Huge numbers of raptors were attracted to these fields because the lush, green vegetation provided excellent habitat for small rodents and insects that served as prey for the raptors.  We sought these areas out because of the sheer number of raptors attracted to them.  The boys soon became good at telling apart two of the common Buteo species we encountered.  Both Red-tailed and Swainson’s Hawks are large raptors that often hunt by soaring although both also can be found stealthily acting as sit-and-wait predators on whatever perch site they can find.  Both also have variable plumage, so field marks sometimes aren’t all that diagnostic.  Add to that the fact that a lot of the birds that we saw were back-lit making them just a dark silhouette of a raptor.  Those silhouettes are pretty different, though, with Swainson’s tending to be thinner and longer-looking and Red-tails looking a bit like they are body builders.  The kids themselves came up with the mantra that Swainson’s are svelte and Redtails are robust!

    

Svelte or robust?  Can you make the call?

 A moral of this story is that kids like to be reminded that they do know a lot, and that the birding skills they are developing are useful and can be something that gives them pride.

          

Kids as co-leaders

               Most kids, mine included, don’t like to go along on field trips involving mostly older birders.  Let’s face it.  It can be incredibly boring for young kids to enjoy the company of birders substantially older than themselves.  What’s even worse is when the kids feel like they are not very good at birding, and people patronize them by telling them that they are better than they know they are.  This is not helpful, and kids see right through it.  That actually can be humiliating for them. 

 I have been lucky to stumble on a way for my kids to feel good about “having to go” with me while I led a field trip for older folks who were mostly new to birding.  We showed up early at the meeting spot to get out the scope and make a quick assessment of what birds were around.  About a dozen people showed up.  Most were pretty new to birding, and some had no optics.  We started with introductions, a bit of discussion about expectations, and some instruction on using optics.  My kids, in their early teens at the time, were tagging along with no expectations of helping out.  As we started our bird walk, I quickly got swamped with questions and requests for help.  On top of that, there were some people who clearly needed some help, but were too timid to ask “the experienced leader.”  The birders soon started asking my kids for help.  “How do you make both of these binocular thingies focus at the same time?”  “Where is that bird they are talking about?”  “Is that bird over there a goose?”  Later, as we were driving home, my kids were talking among themselves, and they expressed disbelief that they knew a lot more about birding than the adults on the walk. 

Let kids demonstrate their expertise.

       

     A moral of this story is that letting kids demonstrate their competence is much more confidence-boosting than showering them with false praise.

               There are a lot of ways to involve kids in birding and to help them to become better at it.  Many of those ways have more to do with building confidence, providing social support, allowing them to demonstrate what they’ve picked up, and getting them excited about nature than turning it in to a lesson about bird identification.