Bird and Beaver Watching

Our Earth Scouts this mission this weekend (from I Love Dirt), was bird-watching. We headed out after much coaxing and complaining Sunday morning--I often wonder if I'm going to have the opposite effect on my kids and they'll turn out hating nature and the outdoors because I dragged them away from the things they really wanted to do (i.e. Lego's) every week--with binoculars in hand. The book suggested a scavenger hunt for birds--look for a brown bird, look for a colorful bird, look for a singing bird, etc.--but that seemed too complicated, so instead we just went out and looked/listened for birds.

When we heard or saw one, I tried to avoid being the annoying know-it-all mom, and instead of telling them what the bird was called, tried to get them to describe it: what color is it? what is it doing? what does its song/call sound like?

We made our way across the neighbor's field and checked out some pussy toes blooming in the grass.

We headed into the woods and down to the river where we found lots of signs of beaver activity...

and M did some exploring downstream.

We followed the stream bank upstream toward our property, checking out the beaver dam and lodge along the way.

I had never explored this part of the river before and it was pretty cool to get so close to a beaver lodge. I love how we went out to look for birds and ended up finding beavers (or at least their house and their nibbled branches).

The walk through the woods to the field was a little pucker-brushy, and E got very put-out by the black flies and the raspberry bushes in his face, so that I ended up giving him a piggy-back ride. Otherwise they seemed to have a lot of fun, until we got home and Z said, "Next time let's just stay home." Oh dear.

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P.S. New post up at Capital Walks today!