Bird Experiment 1: What do Our Backyard Birds Eat?

Do you get Homeschool Enrichment Magazine? They always have fun features like Inventions that Changed the World, Unit Study, Adventures in History and Try It! among others. This month in the Try It! feature they have an experiment you can do to find out about the birds in your backyard.




E11 took to the computer to make his data chart. He started with an excel type spreadsheet in Open Office and then decided to switch to a word processing version to make a table. Not sure why all of his table isn't showing...I'll keep working on that mystery. For now here's a peek. He has a grid for the whole thing though it does not appear that way.

Bird Experiment Spreadsheet


Then we put the food sources out in the yard. As you can see we spread them out and I threw in our crocus too. Yes...one crocus. But it is lovely.
We set this up yesterday morning and this morning the food was gone. Except for the bread crumbs. No one like those!

The only problem...we didn't see anything take the food. Since our data collection included details of which birds like what, this is a problem for our young scientists.

So, today we are regrouping and trying to figure out how to modify our experiment to get the observations we want.

We're also predicting what stole the whole suet cake. My money is on the crows. Today we should keep our eye out for an overly energetic crow which has a taste for apple suet. Maybe I need to spring for the suet cage at $1.47. Ahem.