Kids and Bird Language:
How to trick get young people into paying attention to bird language
So how do we get people (young people especially) motivated to pay attention to bird language when:
1. there’s absolutely no real survival consequences if they don’t, and
2. the social cost / benefit ratio of knowing stuff about birds (ie. being nerdy versus being cool, wandering around for hours and hours in the bush on your own listening to birds rather than smoking bongs and playing lead guitar in a tragic indie-pop band with your groovy pals etc) is still overwhelmingly cost-heavy
Incidentally it is possible to do both you know, but it does somewhat plausibly explain the general paucity of extroverts in the bird language game relative to the sheer abundance of them in terrible indie-rock bands.
Ok so firstly, over the many years I’ve been working with young people on nature-connection camps in the bush, the major lessons I’ve learned are this:
- It has to be fun (not as in the type of fun a math teachers promises to make algebraic equations for the class, but actual, real-deal fun)
- It has to be authentic
- It has to be an experience that is shared across a group (shared stories)
- It has to be incremental learning and offer a series of novel horizons
- It should rely on challenge-based, achievable advances
- It should be based on guided self-discovery, not simply “taught”
The fastest and most effective approach is through demonstrating the seemingly magical ability for people who learn even a modicum of bird language knowledge to track the appearance and movement of predators in the landscape without ever having seen them. Hence although bird alarm is an ideal place to start the bird language journey for most people, for kids it’s pretty much the only way to get a foot in the door. After that, it gets easier.