Birds of a feather....

I so love all of my bloggy friends.  They make my life so much easier!  L and I started learning about birds a few weeks ago and luckily for me we weren't the only ones!

We have floor to ceiling windows in our kitchen which look into the back garden.  We can watch the birds at the feeder and in the bird bath while eating and have started looking them up in our two bird books.

I made up this little chart of the three different environments we see most of the birds in.  Every time we see a new one we look it up in our bird book, find a picture on the Internet to copy and L pastes it on wherever she's seen it.  So far we haven't seen anything too exotic but it's still really quite exciting when we see a new one. 

Bear and her mom over at The Adventures of Bear have also been learning about birds and I got this yummy idea for edible birds nests from her.

We also made these gorgeous birds nests as shown on The Magic Onions.  L's is the one on the left.  We first talked about what type of things birds would use to build nests.  To make our own we used some yarn, wool batting to fill in the nest and I made some wool eggs for them.  I love how they look on the nature table.

Another brilliant idea from The Adventures of Bear!  We made up some snacks which birds would eat.  Sunflower seeds, berries, spaghetti for worms and banana for the tropical birds.  We then used some tweezers, tongs and chopsticks as bird beaks.  L had the most fun when we took turns pretending we were baby birds being fed by their mother.  The unanimous conclusion was that hands are much easier!

Seems like bird study is very popular this time of year as most of the books were also signed out at our library.  We did find a really cute one called In the Nest by Anna Milbourne which was perfect for our nest building.