Fifth Grade Birders Research Wild Campus Residents

The singing of a nuthatch outside Colorado Academy’s Lower School during a busy morning drop-off may not make much of an impression on most ears. But for CA Fifth Graders, it’s an event—loud and clear. 

“There were 10 of us all looking up into the trees to try to find a tiny, round puff,” recounts Allison Peters Jensen, the CA Library Director and Lower School Librarian, after one such occasion. Peters Jensen worked with her colleague, Lower School Library Assistant Jordan Knowles, to design a bird-focused research unit as part of the Fifth Grade’s annual library curriculum.

“Our Fifth Graders are now saying things like, ‘I’m a birder,’ and ‘I’m a birder, too!’”

 

With their distinctive ability to climb both up and down the trunks of the trees, nuthatches are just one of the many unique bird species that can be found on CA’s campus; students can regularly spot (and often hear) Canada geese, red-tailed hawks, Woody’s Pond-loving cormorants and herons, hummingbirds, talkative magpies, mallard duck pairs, bright goldfinches, sparrows of all kinds, and woodpeckers such as flickers and sapsuckers. 

 

In part, CA’s plethora of winged residents is the reason Knowles first suggested birds as a research focus.

“It’s tapping into something that’s really popular right now,” she explains, surely no woodpecker pun intended. “Since the pandemic, a lot of people have been turning to birding as an escape, a pastime that’s almost like a game. Birds are such a good indicator for anyone concerned about climate change, too. Students can go beyond bird markings and behavior to study human impacts and conservation.”

There’s no doubt that the fluffy feathers, little chirps and cries, bright colors, awe-inspiring hunting skills, incredible vision, aerial acrobatics, and adorable babies tucked in cozy nests are especially appealing to elementary-age learners.

 

Explains Fifth Grader Reese Oren, “They come in so many different colors and shapes and sizes, and their feathers are unique, and I think they’re really important animals. I like going into my tree house and spotting them with my binoculars.”

Are you for real?

Whether birds or the 50 states—each with their own biggest city, beverage, and bird—Knowles and Peters Jensen teach Fourth and Fifth Graders research skills early in every school year, preparing them for capstone projects in their classrooms. Key among these are ways to evaluate the trustworthiness of online sources, using the “R U 4 R.E.A.L.” framework: R – read the URL; E – examine the content; A – ask about the author and owner; and L – look at the links. 

In an age when students expect to be able to find every kind of information instantly, in digital form, slowing down to first ask, “Can I trust this? Is this for real?” is becoming more important than ever, note CA’s librarians.

“We’re actually spending a lot more time trying to model for our students what it looks like when answers aren’t given to you in an instant: when you have to evaluate multiple sources, search for and integrate different kinds of information, and draw your own conclusions,” explains Peters Jensen. 

 

In Fourth Grade Science, for example, students come to the Lower School Library to research planets—a field of study in which information that’s only a year old could still be out of date. “They really have to check publication dates and other details like that,” Peters Jensen continues. “Some sources might say that Jupiter has a certain number of moons, when our knowledge of the planet has changed very recently.”

Birds may be the ideal vehicle to force student researchers to slow down. After all, one of the biggest attractions birders cite is how meditative it can feel to watch, in silence, as our winged neighbors go about their lives, and wait for a glimpse of a particular throat color, wing pattern, or tail shape so another species can be checked off an endless bucket list of incredible fliers.

“The projects we’re designing now are deliberately made so they can take their time and really dig in to their subject,” says Knowles. “There are times in the library when we’ll see Fourth or Fifth Graders work on an illustration or a diagram almost silently for half an hour, which is remarkable.”

 

It doesn’t hurt that birds represent an incredibly deep and rewarding field of study, with researchers and enthusiast communities having made available to the public free, high-resolution images of every species imaginable, worldwide crowdsourced data on their habitats and migration patterns, and authentic recordings of each one in the wild. (When Fifth Graders discover the renowned Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s interactive website, which can play bird sounds and closeup behavior videos on repeat, the Lower School Library grows a little noisier than is ideal.)

But in keeping with the librarians’ emphasis on slowing the pace, one resource has proved particularly powerful: reference books—yes, the kind made of paper.

 

Books are an endless source of new discoveries for young students, says Knowles. From field guides to the birds of a specific state or region to massive encyclopedias of all the world’s species, with thousands of bright and intricate illustrations created by hand, “Bird books replace the impatient ‘click, click, click’ of working on a computer with curiosity and serendipity, where looking up one thing reveals countless others in the same page or chapter,” she argues.

Bird stories

Creating their very own field guide is, in fact, the culmination of Fifth Graders’ bird research. From a list Knowles compiled of the species commonly seen at CA—which includes the house finch, black-capped chickadee, American crow, red-winged blackbird, barn swallow, Say’s phoebe, and at least 40 more—students choose a bird to study in depth.

 

Fifth Grader Nolan Leblanc is researching the downy woodpecker; with the distinctive, black-and-white crosshatching on its wings, which Nolan is sketching in painstaking detail, the species is one of the easier-to-spot residents on campus. “This project is really close to me, because I love birds—they’re so cute,” he says. “I found out that if you feed birds, then you become a part of their community. So I started feeding them; I like being part of their community.”

Some students are newer to the world of birding; others, like Nolan, are experienced observers of the sky and trees.

Fifth Grader Lia Purviance recounts, “One time, me and my mom and dad were camping with my little sister, and we decided we would make a list of birds we wanted to try to find. On our hike, we saw so many of them while we were walking, but there were also lots of random birds that we didn’t know. We found all but three on our list.”

 

Every Fifth Grader seems to have at least one memorable bird story: the hummingbird that made a nest and laid eggs in the backyard garden; the mystery bird with one leg and damaged wing that sat, dazed, on the ground before flying off; the lone osprey gliding high on thermal air currents; or the diving bird that swooped down next to a sailboat and plucked a fish out of the water.

Indeed, the endless fascination that birds inspire with their incredible variety and talents—from the ones that swim underwater to those that can use tools—is a boon for CA’s librarians.

Says Knowles, “We schedule some research days where we don’t answer any of our students’ questions; they have to work through them on their own.”

 

“I tell my students, ‘You can’t learn what a bird looks like, all the different parts of its body, by staring at the ceiling,’” adds Peters Jensen. “You actually have to take the time to observe, to do the research, and to match up what you’re learning with what you can see. They’re young—they’re doing this kind of higher-level thinking for maybe the first or second or third time. But hopefully, with birds as their incentive, it’s something they’ll soon master.”

As long as they keep pecking away...