Introducing Birding to Kids

By: Nick Jones on 5:48 PM

With patience, concentration, and powers of observation, birding can be a wonderful lifelong hobby that’s not only inexpensive but also fulfilling. If you introduce it to your kids at such a tender age, they can easily develop a deeper connection to the natural world. This activity offers a lot of benefits that you can reap once you get the hang of it. It can also be done in nearly any environment, requiring only a few easy tools to enjoy. The best part? It gets the kids to spend time outdoors. Once kids begin engaging in birding activities, they’ll never see the outdoors the same way again. 

Starting out with your birding activity is not like any outdoor activity. You can start with the little things that you know. A good place to start is to ask your child to write down all the birds that they can already easily identify. The list doesn’t have to belong and you don’t have to force your child to review a whole encyclopedia for this. Now ask them to commit to learning a few new ones each week. With this, you can do your research together and bond as you go online or head to the library to learn which species are endemic to your town or region. It might be handy to have a field guide or ID cards. When you have these resources intact, make a list of the most common species in your area and learn with your child. Start small and once you’ve mastered both male and female species, your list just grows as you go along.

Some of your best birding may be in your own backyard or local park or community garden. It's easiest to learn the birds that live around you as you will see them repeatedly and, as they say, practice makes perfect! To ensure that your child will see birds in your early days of birding, think about making and setting up a window of a backyard bird feeder or transforming your backyard into a Backyard Wildlife Sanctuary. If you put up a feeder, stock it up with the favorite seed blends of local birds and keep it stocked. Getting your local birds hooked on your reliable food source only to forget about the feeder through the winter is irresponsible as some of those birds may not survive as well with the food source suddenly gone.

For a nature resort destination in Davao, you can check out Malagos Garden Resort. One of their newly introduced child-friendly resort activities in Davao is birding inside the resort’s premises! Talk about an innovative Davao tourist attraction. Check them out today at malagos.com for more info.