This week before Thanksgiving break, the Black Bats are still hard at work getting all the final parts of our bird project in order. Our timeline is to have our bird project completed before Christmas vacation.  At the beginning of the week, since the weather was so poor, we decided to work on the things we could do inside. This meant put the finishing touches and final efforts into our field guide. We drew detailed illustrations and laminated our covers, and each wrote on the table of contents which will go inside the guide. On Wednesday, we had the Los Toros (5/6) come in for their final session to help us make sure that our field guide page looked just right. We are so proud! Our goal is to not only have a classroom copy of the guide, and a guide to take home with each of us, but to have a few folks from The Teton Valley Regional Land Trust come amd see our habitat on campus for themselves. While they are here, it is our plan to present them with a copy to live at their office. We also began painting the old chicken coup near the garden. We plan to eventually move it over to our habitat site and use it as a sheltered nest for the birds of Teton Valley.

We have had a busy week here working on all the different components of our project as we approach the finishing stages. On Tuesday, we took a short afternoon field trip to the south end of the valley to check on raptors in their prime habitat.  The weather was so nice and hot, the raptor activity was down, but we did luck out and see a large bald eagle perched in an established nest on highway 31. What an unexpected treat! Also, Laurel visited with us on Wednesday and explained to our class about our idea for a water component in our habitat. Our original idea was to dig a hole in the ground and place a small kid pool and fill it with water. Laurel explained to us that we had to think about the dangers of having a big pool filled with cold water at our school campus. We have small preschool students at our school who could fall in, and potantially get cold and hurt. Through group conversation, we realized that we will need to brainstorm a modification to have water in our bird habitat here at school. Also on Wednesday, we had our second visit from the Los Toros (5/6) to help us to research more and make more progress on our field guides. We are getting very excited about our upcoming publication. We decided this week we will add a table of contents to our field guide.

 

In order to educate people on the birds of Teton Valley, the Black Bats are using their knowledge to create a field guide. Each student has picked one bird that they will study in-depth, and then will create one page in our guide that is dedicated to that bird, much like the field guides that the adults in their lives use. We have called on Los Toros to help us! Each Kindergartener is paired up with an older student from Natasha's 5th/6th grade class who will help them research their bird and write their page in the field guide.

We have also decided where on campus we want to build our bird habitat, and have decided that the best spot will be behind the barn. The established native grasses will provide a home for the mice that raptors like to eat, and the fence posts will give a spot for the raptors to perch on. The site also has a great spot that we will till in the spring and plant barley as a food source for trumpeter swans. We will, of course, need to also provide a source of water for the birds. This will most likely be a small pond that we either build in the ground, or bring in a kiddie pool for - time will tell!

At the beginning of the week, we wanted to check on our nests we created last week and see if there had been any activity. With the heavy wind, most of us realized the weather had a taken a toll. Parts or entire nests went missing. Some of us found our nests in different spots, a result of being blown around. Some of us re-located our nests to spots that were more "safe."  We still have high hopes that birds may notice our nests and use them as shelter. We also know that in some cases birds use man-made materials to help with the nest, so perhaps parts of our nest could be reused by a bird making a new shelter. On Tuesday, we revisited our driving question: "How can we as scientists make a habitat at TVCS for the birds of Teton Valley? We needed to really make a decision. Are we making a habitiat for one type of Teton Valley bird, or for several of the birds we have studied, because they require different things for a habitat. After a group discussion, we decided that we wanted to be able to offer thigs for different bird types.