🦅 FRIDAY BIRD FAMILIES: Nuthatches, Creepers, & Wrens

Every Friday we invite you and your homeschool students to learn about a different group of North American birds in your recommended bird guide. It’s a great way to add a few minutes of informal science, geography, natural history, and imagination to your homeschool schedule throughout the year.

This week’s birds (three different families) are the Nuthatches (pages 388–389), the Creepers (pages 390–391), and the Wrens (pages 390–395).

If you’re teaching younger children, the way to use these posts is just to treat your bird guide as a picture book and spend a few minutes each week looking at all the interesting birds they may see one day. With that, your little lesson is done.

If you have older students, one of your objectives should be to help them become fluent with a specialized reference book that’s packed with information, the kind of book they will encounter in many different fields of study. Here’s how your bird guide introduces this week’s birds:

NUTHATCHES — Family Sittidae. These short-tailed acrobats climb up, down, and around tree trunks and branches. Species: 28 World, 4 N.A. [North America]

CREEPERS — Family Certhiidae. With slightly decurved bills, these little tree-climbers dig insects and larvae from bark. Stiff tail feathers serve as props. Species: 9 World, 1 N.A.

WRENS — Family Troglodytidae. Found throughout most of North America, wrens are chunky birds with slender, slightly decurved bills. Tails are often uptilted. Loud song and vigorous territorial defense belie the small size of most species. Species: 82 World, 11 N.A.

When you’re training your young naturalists, teach them to ask and answer from their bird guide some of the first questions any naturalist would ask about a new group — about the Wrens, for example. How many species? (82 worldwide.) Are there any near us? (11 species in North America, and the individual maps will give us more detail.) What are their distinctive features? (Small, chunky, loud voice, decurved bills, and so on.) (And “decurved” is a lovely word, isn’t it — be sure to send someone to your homeschool dictionary to look that one up. And what might be the opposite of “decurved”? Why, “recurved” of course!) 🔎

Pick a representative species or two to look at in detail each week and read the entry aloud, or have your students study it and then narrate it back to you, explaining all the information it contains. This week, for the Wren family, why not investigate the friendly and familiar House Wren (page 392), a noisy little bird found across most of North America.

All sorts of biological information is packed into the brief species descriptions in your bird guide — ask your students to tease it out. How big is the House Wren? (Just 4¾ inches long.) What is its scientific name? (Troglodytes aedon.) Will we be able to find this species where we live? If so, at what times of year and in what habitat? (Study the range map and range description carefully to answer those questions, and see the book’s back flap for a map key.) Do the males and females look alike? What about the adults and the juveniles? What song or call does this species make? How can you distinguish it from similar species? (The text and illustrations should answer all these questions.)

House Wrens are small and brown with a cocked tail (like most wrens, as the family description above suggests), and they can be found in open country, farmlands, and quiet suburban backyards. (They generally avoid denser urban environments.) They are hole nesters and will readily take advantage of artificial nest boxes when they are available. And for tiny birds, they are quite loud, producing a long bubbling song that can be heard from quite a distance.

You can do little ten-minute lessons of this kind with any of the species in your bird guide that catch your interest. Pick one that lives near you, or that looks striking, or that has a strange name, and explore. In the Nuthatch family, for example, why not look at the Red-breasted Nuthatch (page 388), another species found across all of North America. Nuthatches are tree-trunk specialists, and they spend all day climbing up and down trees foraging for insects.

Similarly, in the Creeper family, take a look at the Brown Creeper (page 390), another transcontinental tree-trunk specialist with a thin decurved bill.

In all these Friday Bird Families posts, our aim is not to present a specific set of facts to memorize. We hope instead to provide examples and starting points that you and your students can branch away from in many different directions. We also hope to show how you can help your students develop the kind of careful skills in reading, observation, and interpretation that they will need in all their future academic work.

What ornithological observations and naturalistical notes have you and your students been making in your homeschool this Leo Term? 😊

❡ State symbols: Two species included in this week’s families are United States state birds: the Cactus Wren (Campylorhynchus brunneicapillus), the state bird of Arizona, and the Carolina Wren (Thryothorus ludovicianus), the state bird of South Carolina. 🇺🇸

❡ Homeschool birds: We think bird study is one of the best subjects you can take up in a homeschool environment. It's suitable for all ages, it can be solitary or social, it can be as elementary or as advanced as you wish, and birds can be found just about anywhere at any season of the year. Why not track your own homeschool bird observations using the free eBird website sponsored by Cornell University. It's a great way to learn more about what's in your local area and about how bird populations change from season to season. 🦅

❡ Feed the birds: Setting up a bird feeder is one of the easiest educational activities you can do in a homeschool environment. Here are some tips that will help you get started today! 🐦

❡ Enchiridion: The front matter in your bird guide (pages 6–13) explains a little bit about basic bird biology and about some of the technical terminology used throughout the book — why not have your students study it as a special project. Have them note particularly the diagrams showing the parts of a bird (pages 10–11) so they'll be able to tell primaries from secondaries and flanks from lores. 🦉

❡ Words for birds: You may not think of your homeschool dictionary as a nature reference, but a comprehensive dictionary will define and explain many of the standard scientific terms you will encounter in biology and natural history, although it will not generally contain the proper names of species or other taxonomic groups that aren't part of ordinary English. (In other words, you'll find "flamingo" but not Phoenicopterus, the flamingo genus.) One of the most important things students should be taught to look for in the dictionary is the information on word origins: knowing the roots of scientific terms makes it much easier to understand them and remember their meaning. 📖

❡ Come, here's the map: Natural history and geography are deeply interconnected. One of the first questions you should teach your students to ask about any kind of animal or plant is, "What is its range? Where (in the world) does it occur?" Our recommended homeschool reference library includes an excellent world atlas that will help your students appreciate many aspects of biogeography, the science of the geographical distribution of living things. 🌎

❡ Nature notes: This is one of our regular Friday Bird Families posts for homeschool naturalists. Print your own copy of our River Houses Calendar of American Birds and follow along with us! You can also add your name to our free weekly mailing list to get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🐦 🦉 🦆 🦃 🦅

❡ Homeschool calendars: We have a whole collection of free, printable, educational homeschool calendars and planners available on our main River Houses calendar page. They will help you create a light and easy structure for your homeschool year. Give them a try today! 🗓

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