The Ray's bought a house in a neighborhood across town. So while their parents move, Elijah, Malachi and Matthew came with us to the Alaska Zoo. (Elijah, Lincoln, Malachi, Mathew and Meta) We learned about Birding - how to identify birds by shape, sound, shade (color), and more. We spent 1.5 hours learning about birds. They even brought in a Peregrine Falcon named Snake. Then we spent 1 hour outside in the zoo looking for wild birds. We saw ravens, chickadees, mallards, waxwings and a woodpecker. After the hour, we met up in the auditorium again for pizza and warm cider and to tally all the birds we saw. Our group, The Magpies, saw the largest number of birds, so each of the kids got a laminated guide to Alaska's birds.
The Ray boys and Meta did great outside, but after 30 minutes in 6-degrees-F cold, Lincoln was crying from cold toes. I wrapped my sweatshirt over his coat and we went inside the coffee shop to warm up. We put hand warmers in Lincoln's boots for the walk back to the auditorium and that did the trick. It also may have helped, that instead of looking for birds and being hurried along, we just wandered back and looked at zoo animals along the way.
