8 Ways to Bring Birds and Birding Into Your Classroom

When students have practiced noticing and listening to birds, they can act as citizen scientists and contribute their data to a larger research project.

The Cornell Lab teacher’s guide says:

Citizen science invites “regular people,” including K–12 students, to contribute their observations of something — birds, frogs, plants, weather, the night sky — to a central database, which professional scientists can analyze. It vastly extends scientists’ observational powers and allows them to ask and answer questions that otherwise would be impossible to tackle. For young people, it’s a chance to connect with the outside world in a real, meaningful, and fun way.

To get started, students who are over 13 in the United States can download the Merlin birding app from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Alli Smith, the project coordinator for Merlin, shares these tips for using the app:

Merlin will ask you where you saw the bird specifically and the time of year. A lot of places have different birds depending on the season.

Then, observing the bird for a while can really help. Is it tiny, like a house sparrow? Is it really big, like a goose? And the colors of the bird can help as well. Is it bright and yellow and colorful? Is it solid black?

And then the behavior: What is it doing? Is it visiting a bird feeder? There’s a very small list, relatively, of birds that are likely to visit a bird feeder compared with birds that are elsewhere in the environment. Is it spending a lot of time perched in a tree? Is it walking around on the ground? Is it in the water swimming?

With all of these things put together, Merlin can give you a list of likely birds. But even if you’re not using Merlin, those are the types of things that you should be looking for: the size, color, behavior, location and date.

And as mentioned, Merlin’s Sound ID feature can help you pick out birds by their vocalizations.

The Merlin app is a reference and learning tool. If students are ready to record their observations in Cornell’s scientific database, eBird, they can follow the steps in Merlin.