Saturday, October 3, 2009

P2F Week #1 - 88 Birding Seeds Planted

Each weekly Pledge to Fledge reflection will include highlights and the running total. These first few installments are a backlog from throughout September. Unfortunately, I did not jot down all bird-related interaction = (

Sept. 8th - 10 seeds
: Our first day back to school was filled with faculty meetings. WHat a fun and exciting day. Not surprisingly, I had several teachers coming up to me about recent bird sightings and asking for either identification help or some other info on their newly discovered feathered friends. As they shared their stories, I gladly extended the conversations beyond simple ID and into distribution, related species, and conservatrion issues. These exchanges included:
- Rich's Red-tailed Hawk sightings with his daughter -
- the Turkey Vulture in Tim's neighborhood
- Jen's daughter growing love of Blue-footed Boobies which led to us talking about our more local Northern Gannets.

Sept. 11th - 78 seeds: My first full day with students was bittersweet. Most of our discussion focused on the events of this day in 2001. There were some profound and insightful perspective shared by the young minds in my room.
Following a decidedly solemn class discussion, I was asked a similar question in 3 of my classes today - "Do you like birds?"
Apparently my bird-nerd reputation precedes me as these incoming students already knew of my avian appreciation. I fielded the questions my introducing them to the terms "birding" and "birder".

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