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Schools can be in the city, the suburbs, or the country, but no matter where they are there are always at least some birds on the school grounds. Many classrooms have bird feeders hanging outside their windows, and most students are more familiar with birds than with any other animals except household pets.
In this country and many others, professional ornithologists (scientists who study birds) make good use of amateur birders, including students, to collect valuable data on the distribution and behavior of birds. In recent years, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (CLO) at Cornell University has systematically involved school classes in data collection efforts.
CLO currently has two projects open to school participation. Since 1987 Project Feeder Watch has collected information from bird feeders all over the country. Participants agree to check their feeders for two consecutive days every two weeks -- that could be two school days for a classroom feeder or two weekend days for a feeder at home -- during a six-month period extending from early November to early May (perfect for most schools!). Reports can be mailed to Cornell or (using a Java-equipped browser) submitted over the Internet. In 1996 the project received nearly 70,000 data reports, a huge and valuable collection of information on the distribution and activities of birds.
Of course, you have to be able to identify the birds, but that in itself is a good classroom activity, and lots of information on identification is available online.
If there aren't very many birds around your school, perhaps there are at least some pigeons. CLO's ornithologists are interested in pigeons because, unlike any other wild bird, they are widely distributed in a variety of color patterns. How are these color patterns distributed across the country and what difference, if any, do they make in how the pigeons relate to one another? To answer these questions, CLO started Project Pigeon Watch to collect data from citizens, many of them school children, in all parts of the country. There's no identification problem here; everyone can quickly learn to identify pigeons, if they don't know them already.
There's a small fee ($15) for a class to participate in each of these projects. In return for the fee, you'll receive instructions on how to participate in the project as well as a subscription to a newsletter carrying reports on the project and its results. The two projects are excellent hands-on, or rather eyes-on, science projects for students in a very wide range of grade levels.
Internet Sources
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Posted August 1, 1997. Links updated December 18, 1997. Features remain online as long as they remain current; they may be updated if new information becomes available.
Copyright © 1997, Center for Mathematics and Science Education. Teachers have permission to duplicate this page for use in teaching their own classes. All other rights reserved. You are welcome to link to this page, but do not copy its contents.
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