I Thought I Saw a Tweety Bird
Lesson 2: Birds Help Our River?
I know that the riparian area is not a well known term and the students need to know what it is to help them understand their watershed. That and the thing is Black Capped Chickadees are able to - excuse the pun - take out two birds with one stone by helping both the riparian area and controling insect populations.
The Riparian Area
The riparian... Until the presentation from the person at Caring For Our Watersheds I had absolutely no idea what the riparian area if a river is, never even heard of it. Since this project is so closely linked I knew that your students had to know what they were helping by painting the bird houses.
How Birds Affect The Riparian Area
A healthy riparian area is nice and green filled with so much vegetation. I myself learned this in grade 2 that when birds excrete waste they sometimes leave the seed behind. Take chokecherries for example, their pit is very hard and a chickadee cannot possibly digest something like that. Have you ever hear of using manure (poop) for fertilizer, because the bird poop does exactly that for the undigested seed. It acts as a way to cover it up and give it a chance to grow without something picking it up and it getting taken away.
Another way that seeds are spread is that the chickadees can sometimes be clumsy and when they are flying to their place that they are stashing the food or they are taking it to go eat it can sometimes drop out of their beak. I myself know that black oil sunflower seeds sprout very easily. In my backyard I have feeders set up with the black oil sunflower seeds and beneath them the seeds always sprout when the chickadees make a mess - those troublemakers - and knock the seeds on the groud.
How Birds Affect The River Directly
One of the things chickadees eat in the summer is insects. Insects can be annoying and how do we take care of them? Bug Spray and Chemicals. If we can reduce the amount of bugs people won't have to spray for bugs as often. Especially near the river, if it is sprayed there the ground won't have any time at all to filter out the chemicals if water gets on the sprayed area and runs into the river. Regardless of how far the chemicals are sprayed from the river they don't get filtered out very much before they hit a type of stream. Storm sewers are bad for that, creating a clear path for waterborne chemicals to reach the river.