You’re never too young to enjoy birds and help them thrive. In tandem with the Rockbridge Bird Club, we launched an 8-week Bird Club this fall with a dozen children from Central Elementary School. The idea for the club traces back to last spring. During this uncertain time, Rockbridge Bird Club members joined us as special guests for some of our bird-related PALS programming. About the same time, students enrolled at Central were developing a fascination with our feathered friends through a take-home bird feeder project led by their teachers. The stars (or feathers) were aligning . . .
We conceived our new Boxerwood Bird Club as a way to build on these connections, thus giving children more opportunities to grow into their bird curiosities with wonder and love. Led by Boxerwood educator Jess Sullivan, with support from Bird Club members Bonnie Bernstein and Wendy Richards, the Bird Club met at Boxerwood every Wednesday after school. Funding from the Boxerwood Educational Foundation (BEF) as well as the Rockbridge Community Health Foundation ensured we could offer this program without charge to pandemic-stressed families. Rockbridge County Public Schools also pitched in by providing door-to-door bus transportation.
During our time together, we helped the twelve children learn how to spot birds using binoculars, how to identify them, and how to distinguish their different calls. We learned what different birds eat and what happens when the temperature gets colder, and how the birds stay warm. We also considered the difficulties of migration like light pollution, window strikes, and loss of feeding grounds in flight paths, and played games to experience those challenges first hand.
A special delight was discovering more about owls and especially the two species who reside at Boxerwood, the Great Horned Owl and the Screech Owl. Ever the investigators, we dissected owl pellets to find out what owls eat. Then, with help of volunteer Dave Agnor we also built two Screech Owl boxes and found the best places at Boxerwood to mount them. On our last day together, we made window decals to keep the birds safe and created Gifts of Nature treats to help feed them this winter. What a delight to watch our Bird Club idea hatch, grow, and take flight.
