The Birder

I'm blaming this one on Holland's Sunday School teacher. He came home with tiny, tiny seeds in his pocket, wanting to plant them. So I let him get a plastic container, put dirt in it and stick it in the window. He was a little too generous with the watering. And he's a little impatient with the waiting for the seeds to sprout. But within 3 days, our house (and deck and sections of my backyard) have been turned into an environmentally friendly, bird friendly, compost-lovin' sanctuary.

Here's a rundown of what he's accomplished in the last week of school. He planted the seeds from church; he did a potato and celery experiment with dad, which are still in the window; he's taken out food scraps 5 different times to the compost bin (he actually remembered an old apple in his room and took that out!); he collected dead leaves and a couple buckets of cut grass to the compost bin; he's gathered cut limbs from our Christmas tree and hauled them on the deck; he built a bird sanctuary on the deck, filled three bird feeders, scattered corn that the squirrels are too dumb to eat and called grampa to put in his order for a platform bird feeder. We are charting the birds we see in the yard because that's what we're studying in science right now. But as is typical for Holland, we've taken our learning to the extreme. I should say he's very passionate about what he does. He was trying to create a platform feeder out of 4 different objects from the garage and wanted to tear apart my birdbath in the front yard ("because it's chipped anyways").

I did order a platform feeder with some of the money from our Charter school annual budget and we are hoping to attract some woodpeckers and some other birds that like nuts and sunflower hearts. We are learning how to identify the birds by their physical characteristics. He's now looking more closely (literally) at the birds that come in and they're staying because of his little forest project. The birds hop around on the branches and dine on the food. I can't wait to put up a more varied selection and see what flies into our yard! Here are a couple pictures (taken through a window so we didn't scare the birds off) of Holland's bird sanctuary.