Introduction to Eggs!
A variety of activities awaited students as they arrived for the first day Seabird Camp. Kooka Zee taught Unungam Tunuu phrases about seabirds. Jenya taught similar lessons in Russian. Other kids made bead bracelets for 4th of July. We rotated through other fun stations that included a Bering Sea Maze and Rat Ship hidden picture.
After an introduction, we answered the question: What is a seabird? Kendra dressed up our volunteer bird with all the special features of a seabird.
After learning about our island birds, student attempted to match birds to their eggs and nests. Not an easy task!
Jenya led a session on traditional Slavik egg decorating while Ram worked with a team of murre egg creators using classic Seabird Camp paper mâché techniques. Messy fun was had by all. And kids soon got over their fear of the candle’s flame for the melted wax designs.
Special guest speaker Professor Bruce Lyon, presented a kid-friendly summary of his Rosy Finch research on St. Paul covering such topics as “Why are Pribilof Rosies gigantic?” And “why are there twice as many males as females?” A field trip to the study site followed, where we watched birds get captured and banded. Kids quickly identified some of the 250 color-banded individual birds on the study site.
We started our monitoring effort for a classroom colony of 16 crevice nests. 14 of the nests had eggs. We will check the burrows every day to see the fate of each egg!