Backyard Bird Feild Guides

We have LOTS of birds around here. My kids have been looking out the windows with awe for the last 5 months. It has been one of the bigger benefits of this house. In fact, many of the pictures on the backside of these bird cards are pictures I have taken from our own backyard (the rest are Google search pics).

I got this fabulous idea from Valerie from Frugal Family Fun. She has some amazing ideas and I am loving her style.

I made a few changes as my kids are pretty versed in backyard birds already.

First I collected all the pictures of our local birds I could from Whatbird and put them into a folder on my desktop. Then I looked through my pics of these real birds and added them to the folder. I really like the illustrations, but honestly they usually are much brighter in color and much stronger in detail than the actual birds you see in the wild. So it has been hard for me and my kids to use them as our only form of identification. Where a Junco may look very orange in a picture, they look completely grey/brown in our backyard. So I added photographs to each bird card so they could see the real life coloring along with the illustration showing the details.

I printed them all in wallet size pictures, cut them out and glued them with just a dab of glue stick back to back. Then I covered them in clear contact paper with the names of the birds printed in a font that Cyan can read easily. I then cut the edges to the same size, and punched a hole in the top left corner of each set of pics and attached them all together by size with a keyring that I had left over from making these.

I also split the sets. I put the birds in order by size, making the Hummingbird that comes to our sugar feeder in the beginning of the Small Backyard Bird book, all the way through the Peregrine Falcon at the end of the Big Backyard Bird Book. This way, when they see a bird, they can guess how big it is, and have a good idea where to find what it is called.

They are going in the kids Easter basket tomorrow, along with Logan's fishy game, a homemade charm bracelet for Cyan, the movie Mary Poppins, a treasure box for Alex, and a few books and sweet treats.