Make Your Own Field Guide
HOW TO GET STARTED
Ornithologists use field guides to identify birds. There are many different field guides you can buy. Some specialize in the area of the world - like birds of France Some specialize in the type of bird - like Field Guide to Owls. Some are home-made by someone who is keeping track of the birds they see - this is usually called a Bird Journal and is a little different from a standard guide as you will see.
This project started with a gift. The blank book the kids unwrapped from their gift bag would become their future field guide/journal to help them learn about the birds in their neighborhood, and to capture notes about the ones they saw at their feeder, perched in a tree, or flying by.
But before we got started with our new books, we looked through 4 or 5 samples of Field Guides to see how they were arranged and how the information about the birds was written. After that, we were ready to start making our very own Field Guide.
Whenever you see a bird, the first thing you want to do ALWAYs, is to enjoy it. Whether its singing a song or eating some seed, take few moments to enjoy what a wondrous creature it is. So we looked for birds to admire to get us in the mood.
Then the kids drew a picture of a bird they loved in their new field guide (you also could take a photograph of it and paste it into the field guide if you don’t like to draw).
The next thing you want to do is figure out who this bird is! This is where field marks come in. Here are the materials we used to learn about field marks. There is this handy guide from the Audubon website. It explains field marks so clearly, and gives great examples using a Downy Woodpecker.
FIELD MARKS
FIELD MARKS PRACTICE SHEET
Here’s the test sheet we used to write field marks for a mallard. It’s good practice for writing field marks. All the kids did a marvelous job writing about their birds. This sheet is also from the Audubon site.
A SURPRISE ENDING
6. The next step was to go back to our new Field Guide and write a description for the bird they drew using the field mark method. They made sure to draw a line to connect their various notes to the correct part of the bird. They also learned to record details like the place, the date, the weather, and special thoughts about the bird they might have had. And that is how the first bird of our own special Field Guide got started.
7. The kids learned a lot and worked hard. We ended this project by rolling dice to see who would get first pick of the real Field Guides we looked through at the beginning of this project. They each got to pick one of Granny & Paw’s old field guides for their very own. This way they could have a professional guide to help them make their very own. Granny & Paw hope they use them forever!
