Beautiful Birds With Busy Beaks

For the last couple of weeks we have been studying New Zealand birds as part of our rich concept 'Identity'. In science we have been thinking about how the features of our native birds help them survive in their different habitats. 

The birds we talked about came from different habitats including the sea coast, the forest, wetlands, gardens, rivers and mountains. Mrs Driver had laminated colourful photos of New Zealand birds from different habitats. We sorted them by thinking about the habitats they belonged to and then by putting birds with similar beaks together. We got better at this as we learnt more about how birds use their beaks.

We used different utensils, which imitated the shapes of different beaks, to pick up models of different types of food. 

 

We found the scoop (bill) was good for picking up small shells in water.

We could also pick up items from the water using tongs (long, wide beak) and chopsticks (long, pointy beak) but the scoop let us pick up more at once. 

The chopsticks were good for poking into sand to find shells. They were also good for picking up plasticine shapes (soft-bodied creatures like worms). We made connections between the chopsticks and the long, narrow beak of the kiwi.

We found out lots during our study. One thing that really interested us was the wrybill. It's the only bird in the world that has a bill which curves to one side at the end. This helps it to find insects hiding under river stones.