swans...

This past week about 50 swans have been staying in the field behind our house. I will post a movie of them flying away later. (I think they are tundra swans but they could trumpeter or mute swans).

-the birdman-

spinning and carving...

last saturday me and daddy went to the agricultural museum and i got to learn how to spin, and card wool and I watched the woodworkers do some woodcarving. and i got to spin a whole ball of yarn all by my self! the carving was pretty neat too and i collected some of the shavings. i will post pictures later.



-the birdman-

my brothers blog...

today trumpeter got his own blog. he is very exited. check it out here

-the birdman-

We have a winner!

Actually, we have 3 winners. Congratulations to Mary, Christopher and Kim! Kim actually got all three correct, Stellar's Jay, Great Egret and wood duck. Since she is a bird photographer, it was easy for her. So, I am also going to give a prize to Mary and Christopher because they each got two right. Thanks for participating. Please leave me a comment (or send my mom a PM) to tell me if you want a stellar's jay paper puppet or a bluebird drawing. I need your addresses too.

-the birdman-

I'm having a contest

My brother is having a contest to name his blog so check it out here. I want to have a contest too.
Below are pictures of three birds. The first person that identifies all three of them wins. If no one gets them all, then the first one to get the most wins. The winner will get their choice of a drawing of a bluebird or a paper Stellar's Jay puppet. You have until Monday at 10am to identify the birds. Leave your answers in a comment. Happy birding.
-the birdman
Number 1

number 2

number 3

Pictures from the weekend

the tribe...

This week the B family visited us. They got here on Friday night. We went to the
agriculture museum on Saturday. We got to make mud and i told the story of henry and henry. they left yesterday.

I'll post pictures later, my computer time is up.


-the birdman-

bird coloring pages...

Trumpeter made me & chickadee coloring books for our birthday presents. Here are some of the pages he used. Enjoy!

Our trip to Africa...

Trumpeter, Chickadee and me are going on an adventure. We made it up together. Mommy posted it on her blog, so I'll just copy it here.

"We started in Canada and went to Florida by driving a buggy. It was pulled by a horse. She was too old for us to ride on her back and didn't like us on her back anyway. So, we were in the buggy and she pulled us. She's a grey horse. We were gonna take a ship from Florida to Africa, but a flood washed us into the ocean. It took us a year to get to Antarctica. The buggie sunk, but it had a basement. The basement was sort of like a submarine, so we stayed there. It had candy, icecream, and waffles and that's what helped us survive. There were 800 waffles and seventy hundred pieces of candy. Thirty hundred bags of icecream, two containers in each bag. We finally floated to Antarctica and then the horse pulled us as she swam to Madagascar. Now we are on our way to Africa. We are going to Africa because we need to take the icecream there. It has now taken us almost two years to get there. We are taking the icecream to all the people of Congo. We will just ride through the towns and toss icecream, just like they do with candy at parades. Then we'll go to Ethiopia and do the same thing with all the candy. We mostly ate the waffles on our trip, so we could have the icecream and candy for the people of Africa. We liked traveling this way, so we'll go home the same way probably. Or we might just get on a ship and sail home."

we won ribbons!

We entered projects at the fair and won 8 ribbons. I won 4 and trumpeter won 4. I won 2 honarable mentions and 2 1st place. Trumpeter won 2 honarable mentions and 2 2nd place.

here are some pictures...

Breakfast and other stuff...

Guess what! I am now the family chef for breakfast. I am so excited. I've been having lots of fun making pancakes and sausage, strawberry shortcake, eggs and all sorts of stuff. My favorite breakfast to make is pancakes. My favorite breakfast to eat is strawberry shortcake. The pancakes have 1/3 of a cup of sugar in them. The strawberry shortcakes only have 1 tablespoon. Did you know that 24 times three is 72 and that 24 times 4 is 96? We have lots of baby birds in our yard. We have seen chickadees, robins, mourning dove and some other fledgling that I haven't figured out yet.

Here is a picture of a chickadee fledgling



chickadees eat sunflower seed..

-the birdman-

Happy Father's day to My Daddy!

Happy Fathers Day daddy!
You are the best daddy in the world. You are the best because you take us on field trips and you work hard to provide for us. You love us and always have fun with us. I love you daddy and I hope it's a great day!!

Love,
your little birdman

P.S. Look in the walnut tree for clue number one to your Father's Day surprise!

Pictures from the bird festival...

field trip 2

This past weekend, we went to a bird festival at a local wildlife refuge. We had lots of fun! We got to see a great horned owl, Eastern Screech owl, American Kestrel, Red-tailed Hawk, and Turkey vulture up close. I made a bluebird house and Trumpeter and Chickadee did teamwork and built a feeder. The bugs ate us alive! Also, we went exploring in the brackish water...that's water that has both fresh and salt water mixed. I found a couple of shrimp and some sort of beetle and Trumpeter caught a tiny crab and an eel. The eel was FAST, it was about four inches long. Then we went to the freshwater area and I didn't get anything, but Trumpeter got a HUGE tadpole and a mud minnow. We were supposed to go look for salamanders, but it started storming so we had to go home. On the way back to our van, the refuge driver lady almost hit a deer! He ran right out in front of us, I bet he was running for shelter from the storm. There was a tent set up that had different booths with lots of neat things to look at. Some people had carvings of birds and some had pictures and a bunch of other stuff too. I liked talking with the different people and trying to guess what all the bird carvings/pictures were. My favorite was one of the photographers. Here's her website
Kim Steininger Bird Photography

Mom has pictures but they aren't on the computer yet. I'll upload them soon.

-the birdman-

Pictures from Tristate Bird Rescue

This is one of the places they keep the baby birds. They go in here after they are big enough to come out of the incubator, but not yet flying. Our own little baby nestling (AKA Park) has this same pac-n-play ;-)



Telling me how banding works



Explaining about rescuing birds after an oil spill

field trip 1

we went to Tri-state Bird Rescue for a
open house. We got to see what they feed the birds,where they put the babys,where they band & weigh the birds, where they give the birds baths, and we got to see the empty cages. the cages were empty because they move the birds for the open house.they don't want them disturbed, we got to see the live eagle cam of a baby bald eagle. we had a lot of fun. i hope someday i can volunteer there.

-the birdman-

we've been busy

Since I last blogged, we went on vacation, took lots of field trips and have done all sorts of things. I hope I can write lots of entries soon to tell you about it all. For now, mom says I can only do one entry to tell you about one of the field trips. I will give it its own entry in a minute.

A big surprise!

Last Saturday I got two pet birds. Their names are Henry & Hannah. they are zebra finches. It was a big surprise! Daddy went and got them from a nice lady an hour or so away. Here are some pictures.


-the birdman-


This is Henry
This is Hannah
This is Me when Daddy got home with the surprise

our family walk

We went to Killens Pond State Park last night to go for a walk. they were closed so we turned around. We saw 2 deer getting ready to cross the road so we sat and watched them and 1 looked at us like "go on move so i can get back across". Then we went to the school & walked the the bike trail that goes from the school around the edge of Killen's Pond State Park. We had 2 races & Trumpeter won both of them. Nestling rode in mamabirds sling & screech rode in papabirds sling. we had lots of fun

-the birdman-

Science experiment

We are doing a neat science experiment. We cut up potatoes and planted pieces in five different containers. We are going to see which ones grow, if any. One container has everything it needs to grow. The other ones are each missing something. One has no sun, one has no soil, one has no water and one has no eye(seed). So far none of them are growing, but we will check them later today. It's day nine since we planted them. I'll be back later to write about house finches.

-Birdman

at the feeder...

This morning we saw red-winged blackbirds. We could not figure out why they had just yellow on the wings. We learned that they can conceal their red patch. They eat insects,weed seeds,cracked corn and seed mixes. They were all males, the females are brown. We probably had fifty or so in our yard this morning.

here are some links to pictures and info:

pictures and info...turn up the sound and hear their call

just pictures

Meet the Birdman and his family

I am the birdman :>
I am the oldest child in the bird family. I will be 8 in a few months.

Now meet the rest of my family...
Papabird is my daddy. He's the best daddy in the world. He works hard for us. He is good at math. My daddy likes taking us to the camper and boat shows.

Next is mamabird. She cleans the house, does school with us, reads to us, & loves us lots.

trumpeter (as in trumpeter swan) is one of my brothers. he loves art,space & playing the trumpet. He is about a year younger than me. Trumpeter is my best friend.

chickadee (she likes to say chicka-dee-dee)is my only sister. she is fun to play with especially when she & i play dolls together (even though i'm a boy). she likes when i read to her. she is learning to read short words like cat,bat,sat,sam etc.

next is screech (as in screech-owl becuase he is noisey all the time). He loves riding on his teeter-totter. Screech is a very busy two year old.

next is nestling he has 8 teeth so far. he will be 9 months old next week. His favorite thing is to nurse.

-the birdman

Some pictures I took

The first two are geese flying over our back field. The next one is white throated sparrows on our patio. The last one is a picture of the Condorde. I took the last one when we visited a museum a few weeks ago.

my first post

I love birds especially bluebirds,parrots & eagles. we have dark eyed juncos, american crows, a cardinal & house finches in our yard. the cardinal, juncos & house finches love black oil sunflower seeds. it is 35.6°f outside here right now. Today I read from the book Pioneers and Patriots. I drew a picture of a sod house. Sod houses is what pioneers from Norway lived in. There weren't many trees in the Great Plains, so they used sod to build houses. I also learned about Leonardo Da Vinci. I changed the computer wallpaper to a picture of the Mona Lisa.

-The Birdman