Wonderful W.Va. bird watching
Sixteen YMCA Day Campers ages 5-6 arrived at Kump Education Center Wednesday afternoon for our first Summer Science event of the year. AmeriCorps member Isabel Harger organized birding activities with KEC Board member Jane Birdsong, AmeriCorps mentors Jeanne Johnson and Kylie Antoline, and me. We learned that the ancient forests of West Virginia offer some of the best bird migration habitat in the world.
Each YMCA camper had an opportunity to observe robins, sparrows, and crows with binoculars in the orchard or south lawn at Kump Center. Before going outside the children looked at small figurines and a poster of birds they might see under the apple and sycamore trees. Cardinals, black-capped chickadees, meadowlarks, and wrens winter over in Elkins. Robins, bluebirds, cedar waxwings, goldfinches, and nuthatches travel only as far as the Carolinas or Florida and return early in the spring.
West Virginia has 171 species of neo-tropical birds. More migratory birds are surviving here than in any other state among the eastern states. These birds are not often seen in Elkins, but they visit our forests and can be seen on our rail trail where they sing high in the trees in June. On a bike ride last Sunday we saw an Indigo Bunting and a Scarlet Tanager. Warblers and other tropical songbirds enliven our forests this time of year.
Around the World was the central theme for the YMCA Day Campers this week, and we wanted them to understand how far birds travel from Elkins. WV neo-tropical birds fly south of the Tropic of Cancer. They may fly from Elkins to Cuba (about 1,200 miles away), the Yucatan Peninsula (about 1,500 miles away), and other Caribbean costal forest areas.
Migratory birds must prepare and travel with care on their long journey. They eat lots of food and gain weight before leaving home. They must wait for good weather and try to avoid high winds or tropical storms. They need forest stopovers where they can rest and refuel for the trip.
Half of the migratory birds do not survive their long migrations.
Some birds have a small magnetic bone in their heads that serves them like a compass. To help the children understand how birds know which way to fly, we went outside to use a compasses to orient ourselves on the intersection between Kump Education Center, Hiawatha’s, McDonald’s, and Kroger. With N-S-E-W for the four cardinal directions drawn in chalk on the driveway the children played a little game stepping two steps to the north, three steps to the south, one step to the east, and two steps to the west.