Urban Bird Study for Your Charlotte Mason Homeschool

The Charlotte Mason method encourages a lot of nature study. In our family, we started by studying flowers and other plants, and insects, too, but I think, for our family, having all boys, studying birds was really what made it click for us.

Bird watching as our foray into CM nature study

When we first started studying birds, we lived in the second floor of an apartment building perched right in the middle of a busy city street, with a major supermarket just across from us. We had a small balcony that opened to the open parking area below, which was just wide  enough for one car to park. On the other side of the parking area was a tall concrete wall with a lone tree standing right smack in the corner.

First Bird Study Experiences

My oldest son was then around five years old, and we would kneel on our sofa right beside the sliding glass doors, our eyes intent on that solitary tree sitting on our next-door neighbor’s lot. Whenever we spotted a bird, my son would squeal with delight and I would mentally tick a check mark next to Nature Study. At that point, we weren’t too good yet at identifying specific birds; simply spotting them and paying attention to them was a good first step. 

Before long, we moved to a townhouse in the suburbs. That took our birdwatching to greater heights. There we would take walks with the baby and find these loud, tiny yellow birds that had beaks shaped like a hummingbird’s sipping nectar from the yellow bells. We soon learned these were olive-backed sunbirds. 

Then, on our daily walks around the subdivision, we started noticing these black birds that looked like crows, with shiny feathers and bright red eyes. Using websites and blogs on urban birds, we confirmed that these were Asian glossy starlings. 

By that time, we felt more confident in identifying birds, and having exhausted some of the common urban birds in blogs and images downloaded from the Internet, we invested in our first field guide. We would spend time getting to know the birds in our subdivision, learning to identify them by sight and differentiating the shapes of their bodies, wings, and bills, as well as remembering their colors even as they flitted by. 

During that time, we spent a lot of our afternoons sitting in the back of our tiny townhouse, which opened to vacant lots that we started to farm. One of our most memorable times was when we first spotted the Philippine pied fantail, which perched on a branch right in front of us, singing and dancing by wagging its little tail as if in time with its music! 

Water Birds and Migratory Birds 

Then we moved again, this time to an apartment building just a few minutes’ walk away from a riverside park. During that time, we had another baby, so our daily stroller walks made  use of this free 2-kilometer stretch around the river. We were happy to find our sunbird friends there, too, mostly along the heliconia flowers. 

The river afforded a glimpse into the lives of water birds. We watched egrets and terns hunt for fish—a couple of times, we stood transfixed as dozens of terns dove into the water again and again. 

Another time, near sunset, we wondered at what seemed to be an army of swallows, hundreds and hundreds of them, it seemed, soaring just a few feet above the water, all of them heading toward the same far-off destination unknown to us. Were they all flying away at such a rate as a portent of some kind of weather disturbance, a coming storm perhaps? 

Once in a while, we would find a fellow bird watcher in complete gear, in long-sleeved suits and long pants, with a long lensed camera in tow. We made friends with one of them during our homeschool group bird watching; he happily shared with us his passion for migratory birds. 

At about that time, we were also learning about migratory birds, which usually come in the country around October/November, and fly back to their homes around late January/February. So we were happy to find a like-minded comrade, and we spent a bit of time talking about the red-legged stilts and some of the other water birds that came to our country and city every year. 

The Philippines is a favorite destination for migratory birds. A lot of them take a “break” from the flight to warmer destinations in one of the many watersheds in the country, such as marshes, mangrove swamps, and coastal areas. 

Drawing Birds 

The challenge with drawing birds is that they fly away fairly quickly. What we usually do is that when we spot a bird, we try to identify it using our field guides so that we can then draw them based on a static image.

One way to up the challenge of drawing birds would be, after you’ve been comfortable with spotting them, identifying them, and drawing them from a static photograph would be to practice drawing them live! I wouldn’t recommend it for a beginner, but my son who has been nature journaling for years has tried his hand at it, using his pet lovebirds as models—so at least, they’re in a cage and can’t easily fly away! 

In any case, in this post, we will stick with simply spotting the birds and drawing them from your field guide. That means you need to learn how to identify them quickly before they fly away! The following section discusses tips on identifying them: 

Identifying Birds 

Some tips for identifying birds include: 

1. Stay quiet! The quieter you are, the longer time you have for observing every detail of your subject.
2. It’s best to use binoculars so you can have a closer-up look at the bird. Unless you have 20-20 vision, you may not immediately notice all the details. Many birds look alike from the distance. You need to be able to see them up close. 
3. Discover what kind of bird it is based on its feet and beak. For example, predatory birds usually have hooked beaks and talons designed to grip their prey. Water birds tend to have thin, long, webbed feet, designed for swimming in the water. 
4. Take note of the size and use your visual estimate to compare it to the details in your field guide. Sometimes a bird you spot flitting quickly away may look similar to the picture in your book, but when you check the size and it doesn’t add up, it may very well be a different kind of bird. 
5. Remember the kind of location where you spotted the bird, and also use that detail to check against your field guide. Most field guides indicate where a bird is most commonly seen, for example, in bushy areas, near rivers, or in the highlands, as well as which parts of the country. (Of course, this doesn’t mean that you won’t be able to find it where you are if your place isn’t mentioned by name, but you can use it as a guide to deduce whether it’s possible that you’ve spotted that particular bird.) 
6. Sometimes, you might be able to spot and identify its general kind, for example, that it’s a swallow, or a kingfisher. Then, you can go into detail by learning to remember the colors on their head, chest, a wing band if they have any, and tail. These color differences go into the specific naming of birds.