Bird Adaptations Lesson and Activity

Objectives

Students will:
1. be able to define the concept of adaptations.
2. describe how adaptations reflect the place where a bird lives and its lifestyle.
3. infer where a bird may live by examining its adaptations.

Time needed: 30 minutes

Materials
1. Bird bio-facts, especially beaks and feet.
2. Food material such as rice, seeds, pasta or other objects that can represent bird food.
3. Tweezers, chopsticks, tongs, spoons, slotted spoons, straws or other objects that can represent beaks.

Site Setup
1. Determine boundaries for the activity section.
2. Scatter food items at one end of the activity area.

Instructional Sequence

Introduction
1. Ask students to name several species of birds.
2. Ask students if all of the birds they named look alike? Why or why not?
3. Explain that birds have different shapes and sizes according to what they eat and where they live.

Explore and Explain
4. Illustrate beak and foot differences with the bio-facts, live birds or pictures of birds.
5. Ask students to guess what this bird may eat or where it may live based on the form of the bio-fact or bird.
6.   Explain how these differences reflect the environment where these birds live or the food which they eat.
7.   Introduce and define the word “adaptation”.
8.   If desired, explain that a bird successfully adapts if it succeeds at finding food and having offspring. Birds who cannot successfully gather food in a certain area must either move elsewhere or die.

Activity
9.   Separate the students into four or five groups.
10. Give each group a “beak” represented by some kind of object, such as tweezers, tongs, spoons, etc.
11. Relate each beak to a type of bird (e.g. chopsticks = ibis) and, if possible, have a photo of that bird available. Each group then becomes that bird.
12. In the form of a relay race, have them run to the other end of the activity area, retrieve a piece of food and bring it back to their group. They may only use their “beaks” and must not use their hands. If the "bird" drops a piece of food on the way back to the group, it is not retrievable.
13. The winner is the group that retrieves the most pieces of food.

Wrap Up
14. Discuss why a certain group won. What food were they searching for? In what ways were some birds’ beaks better adapted than others? What does this imply for the survival of that bird in that area?
15. Reiterate that birds are adapted to live in certain places, based on the food they eat and the other factors of their environment. Review how some specific birds are adapted to specific places.

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