Last Thursday, we went on our first field trip. We went to McDonald Woods! McDonald Woods is a very unique forest preserve because it has three distinct habitats the students can walk through and observe. Those habitats are wetland, forest, and prairie! We walked on a loop that took us through all three of these habitats. When we reached a section of the habitat we thought would be good to stop and do a bird count, we did it. Each of these stops was about seven minutes.
During our bird counting stops, we would use a sheet of paper we had with the pictures of different birds we might find in the area and kept track of what we saw by using tally marks beneath the picture. We tried to use a different color for each of the habitats. We saw a lot of cool birds including a woodpecker, some red-tailed hawks, and blue jays. The interesting thing was that we seemed to see more when we were walking than when we were sitting for our count. We saw the most birds at the prairie. Make sure to ask your student what their favorite bird they saw was!