Exciting Announcements and More Birding!

We arrived in the bay area just before Halloween and with enough time to create some bird costumes for ourselves. We took a few days off from teaching and have been getting ready for a full week of workshops in the bay! Just yesterday, we led an open sunset bird walk in Tilden Regional Park for the Berkeley community which included some Berkeley grad students and alumni.

Female Black-Crowned Night Heron

Male Black-Crowned Night Heron

We got some great looks at the Black-Crowned Night Herons and were able to see the differences between the male and female birds. They stood completely still for all of the time that our attention spans could take and allowed us to get quite close for some good photos.

Kevin talking about the lengthy Mallard mating season and the identification differences between duck species

Sunset on Lake Anza

Checking out the beautiful Bufflehead ducks! Check them out here!

The Night Heron perched over a mixed flock of American Coots, Mallards,  Pied-Billed Grebes, Common Mergansers, and Buffleheads

Sasha getting good looks at the Night Heron

In other news, we have been waiting for weeks to be able to make this announcement and now, we are official! Just as we began our project, we applied for a grant through an incredible organization called The Pollination Project. This organization gives thousands of dollars to budding social change organizations and projects (such as ours) in order to help folks make real change happen. The Pollination Project just made their official announcement about our grant. 

Check out the announcement at:  http://thepollinationproject.org/grants-awarded/kevin-condon-and-darrow-feldstein-the-bird-school-project/. 

They are funding some of the most inspiring and creative projects we have ever seen so be sure to check out heir whole website and learn about all of the amazing things that people are doing all around the world!

Two beautiful mornings with Kenwood Elementary and The Meadow School in Sonoma county

Its getting spooky up in the northern part of the state. The mornings are colder, sometimes frosty, and the days are short.

Kevin explains how to look for a bird in a field guide and why field guides are useful.

photo from www.bird-friends.com

Yet, the Black Phoebes keep on catching the highest perch on the playground, and the students continue to find them in the field guide.

With Bird School, students are encouraged to go out into the field, observe nature, record their observations, ask questions, and repeat the process. This is the same method used by former professor of natural history at UC Santa Cruz, Kenneth M. Norris. He called it "spinning the wheel." This practice has proven to be extremely transformative in the lives of budding naturalists and has helped to create some of the top naturalists, interpreters, scientists, and land managers in California. 

Kenwood Elementary's 4th graders "spin the wheel."

This week we worked with some very bright 3rd and 4th grade students from Kenwood Elementary and The Meadow School. They asked many questions and learned how to answer their questions through observation. Ms. Cagle and Ms. Forester's classes at Kenwood even watched the power of their observations be put to work as we taught them how to record their sightings on ebird.com, an international database for bird observation run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. More on ebird soon!

We're looking forward to more schedules like the one below. Bay Area here we come!

The schedule for Mr. Wright's class.