Friday, September 23, 2011

A Hoopoe in Our Yard

What is a hoopoe? Let me start from the beginning.

Over the months of reading about different types of homeschooling philosophies, I found that nature study is an important facet of the Charlotte Mason type curriculums I have considered.  Time outdoors, a nature notebook, animal identification… So I wanted to buy a field guide or two yet didn’t want to spend the money and/or never followed through. Finally my husband said I should go for a DK one—our DK travel guides were always nice with great pictures.

I’ve tried to mark a few birds in our book {RSPB Birds of Britain and Europe by Rob Hume (DK)} that I saw might be in Portugal, and we think we’ve spotted a few. But yesterday we hit the mark. My husband saw a strange bird fly out of our yard with a head full of feathers poking up like a peacock. He came in to tell us and was able to grab the book and one daughter before the bird flew away.

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The best thing was that this bird, the Hoopoe, is on the cover of our book! How convenient was that! I missed seeing the bird that first time and found it hard to believe such a bird would be seen here. Little did we know this bird would take a liking to our yard. He has come back several times a day over the past two days, and I’ve had several opportunities to take pictures of it {through windows only so far—it flies away once we open a door.}

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I want to keep trying to get a photo of the Hoopoe with its head feathers up. So you can see, here is a photo from Bird Forum by Rajiv Lather .

Rajiv Lather

We’re so thankful at how this has energized nature study for our whole family—albeit somewhat more spontaneous than I planned! It’s amazing what we see when we are looking!

2 comments:

  1. Hi Jenny, It's so wonderful that you are keeping a nature journal with the kids. I think most of our generation had no idea growing up what birds or vegetation lived/grew in our regions. I've also heard good things about Charlotte Mason. You should post more on that as well.

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  2. cute! that is fun for you guys...and to think we were just amazed at a giant snail the other day...your bird is cooler ;)

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