Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Things that happen when you say, "I don't know let's go find out"

Alice found a special treasure in our back yard this evening while we were out watering and checking on the veggies.  It was the beautiful feather shown here.



After a few attempts at finding images of feathers from which to identify the bird to which the feather belonged we found THIS fabulous resource: The Bird Atlas.  It is a feather identification atlas and was a really fun way to learn a little bit about feathers as well as how a biological key works for Alice.


Here is one of the possibilities we thought might be a match.  The bird does live here according to the range map we looked at and I've seen it recently as well.



The especially cool part was that now Alice was interested in learning more about the Ferruginous Hawk and she happily spent 30-40 minutes looking at the information on allaboutbirds.org on the largest Hawk species of North America.  I'm not completely convinced we got it right (the feather is far from being an exact match) but she certainly learned something in the process about how to research something to "find out" and we had a good time finding two great new resources.  If you have the expertise to confirm or deny our findings, I'd love to hear from you on the subject.  OR if you've had a similar experience with your little one, please share!

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