Those love birds!

One reason I love to homeschool my kiddos is that I get an awesome opportunity to learn right alongside my kids. Today we were having a nature study time on Cardinals and discovered some very neat things about them. Like, did you know that during nesting season the male cardinal feeds the female. BTW: the red ones are male, females are brown. It's a beautiful site to see. The male works very hard to gather food for her and then walks over to the female and spits it into her mouth. How romantic! Well, not really. But for bird romance I think it ranks right up there for the most romantic things to do for your bird mate.

Well, I got to witness this today with the kids and this started us on a mission to learn more about them. If I wasn't homeschooling I never would have given this transaction between these birds a second thought. But because I had three inquiring minds asking me questions that I could not answer, we began on a quest to find out. One very neat thing we found on the Internet was a recording of bird sounds and calls. We were able to hear what a Cardinal sounded like. We also read that they are very territorial birds and will chase away any other Cardinals from the area. This information got us intrigued. We figured we would find out how territorial they really are. So...We flew open the back door and cranked up the computer speakers full blast and pressed play. Oh! What fun we had! It took the Cardinal about 30 seconds to come flying right up to the back porch ready to charge this other bird away. We were all laughing and having fun with this bird. Of course, he probably didn't think it was so funny. Then he began repeating the sounds from this other bird on the computer, and before long the female bird was in on it too. This went on for about 20 minutes. The kids had so much fun, or rather I should say, I had so much fun today learning about a bird I didn't know much about before. Next week's nature assignment is Blue Jay's. I can't wait! I wonder what they will do?