Ah, what a time to be a young birder in America! Not only is there an endless, free torrent of thrilling birding content online, but some of our sharpest minds have tackled the thorny task of creating a field guide strong enough for an adult, but made for a kid. Thus we have Bill Thompson III’s terrific Young Birder’s Guide to Birds of Eastern North America, and when I say “we” I mean we at 10,000 Birds have three copies of this guide that we’d like to give to YOU.
Really, we’d like to give these books to three young nature lovers on the precipice of a rewarding lifetime of bird watching adventure. Our friends at Houghton Mifflin, the publishers of this outstanding work, would probably like that as well. But I suspect that any teen or tween who reads this site regularly knows his or her way around the full arsenal of North American field guides. This is why we’re counting on YOU (yes, using caps again for emphasis, thanks for noticing) to help these guides find their way into the right hands.
Since we have three free copies of The Young Birder’s Guide to Birds of Eastern North America to give away, we’ll offer three different ways to get them:
- If you are an adult, we’d like you to share your favorite tips for How to Get Kids Excited About Birds. What do you do and how successful are your efforts? These tips will be compiled in one mega post so take this opportunity to share all your secrets for getting children and teens engaged with nature.
- If you are a kid younger than 16, we’d like you to write a short essay, about 100 words or so, on Why Watching Birds is Fun. Tell us what interests you, why you look up when you hear a cool bird, and even which kinds of birds you like best.
- Anybody of any age has a shot at receiving a free copy of this guide simply by helping to promote this giveaway. Write about it on your blog, post it on a forum, or submit it to a social bookmarking site… we love it all. Plus, because the emphasis of this contest is on getting these field guides into the hands of the kids that would best appreciate them, we want to encourage everyone to get kids involved. Thus, for every entry written by a child younger than 16 on the topic of Why Watching Birds is Fun that you submit, you’ll have another chance to win this third giveaway. Teachers and youth-group leaders, I’m talking to you!
So, there’s a way for everybody to participate in this promotion and win a free copy of Bill Thompson III’s The Young Birder’s Guide to Birds of Eastern North America. Did I mention that our pal Julie Zickefoose illustrated this book as well? Seriously, this book is good! If you haven’t already seen it, read Charlie’s superb review of the Young Birder’s Guide and then spread the word. I know most North American birders are a bit occupied with spring migration and all, so let’s give this competition two weeks to play out. Send all essays and notification of promotion to me by Wednesday, May 28. Based on the number of submissions, participants in the first two competitions will either be selected randomly, by our crack panel of judges, or by reader poll. The “promote the promotion” book will be assigned randomly. Good luck!
My favorite way to get kids excited about birds is to arrange to have a raven come and peer in your classroom window and cronk at the kids everyday during Math. That gets them all fired up and they ask you questions about how to tell Ravens from Crows and write you raven poems and stuff like that. It’s a “can’t miss” technique. 🙂
Great idea, Liza Lee. But how do you get the raven to come to the window in the first place?
We have our resident playground red-shouldered hawk, innumerable playground crows, the bluebirds nesting in the classroom garden, and the assorted little guys feeding at our classroom window feeder. We also have an environmental education center in our school district. There we visit to watch the rehabilitation of owls and vultures (Pocahontas the Golden Eagle died) that have been injured or imprinted. We examine the mounted specimens that now including Pocahontas, and the Snowy Owl that somehow ventured all the way south to Georgia, and many others. Our little hummingbird that struck our school window and died is there in a freezer awaiting financing for preservation. And we walk with our binoculars and cameras through the wetland looking for vultures, kingfishers, woodpeckers, and ducks.
I look forward to reading good tips for getting my students more involved in birding.
Laugh. I wish I knew the secret to getting the raven to become fascinated with OUR classroom. Not sure how I did it. My other favorite technique is to take them with you when you go birding. I took the kids on a long walk about a year ago along West Cliff Drive in Santa Cruz. It was beautiful and wow did we love it. I saw lots of amazing birds and the kids saw and were interested in some of them. I guess my message is keep it easy and fun — let them set their level of interest. My kids have learned to ID birds in spite of themselves. That’s the REAL way to build interest, I think.
This is a wonderful thing you are doing Mike! We need to see many more people trying to encourage children to enjoy the outdoors! Bravo and can’t wait to see what everyone sends you!
My three-year-old can identify about ten birds by their calls and sounds. Here’s a link to some popular mnemonics, but we have fun making up our own. He thinks our pileated sounds like a machine gun…
http://www.biologycorner.com/birding/songs.html
Cool, Rick. I’d love to hear some more about your son’s mnemonics.
I take my granddaughter with me when I bird. She is with me a couple of times a week while her mom works and she doesn’t have a choice. But she enjoys getting out and about. She always wants to look the bird up in the field guide when we find a new or interesting bird. She then reads to me about the bird (she’s nine). She also keeps her own list of birds.