What's in mixed bird seed & which do our birds like best?

This week at WOW! Club we started to prepare for The RSPB Big School's BirdWatch. We looked at the materials we had got through the post and talked about how we might organise the watch. We already have a bird table and one feeding station set up, but decided to set up another, which is visible to some of our other classes. There was already a wooden frame on the fence, so perfect for another set of feeders....

We taked all about how to attract the most species of birds... we decided the two key things would be the types of food we put out and the ways we fed it. We thought it would be like only offering one dish at a restaurant... you would only get people visiting who liked that one dish. If you didn't like it, you would go somewhere else to eat.

We have a bag of Ark Wildlife Premium Bird seed. What species would that attract? We decided to analyse what was actually in this food. We each got a pile of it and we sorted it into the different types of seeds present....

 We could recognise some of the seeds: Black sunflower, striped sunflower, sunflower hearts, rolled oats, flaked maize, wheat..... and some we didn't recognise.

We wondered which seeds the birds would like best? We devised a test to try to find out. We took about the same amount of each seed type and placed it in some little containers that we cut out of recycled plastic cups.....

We then blue tacked these little pots onto our bird table. We are going t see which seed types are eaten first and try to see which are most popular!

Once we had set this up we got thinking about bird feeders of our own design. In next week's club we are going to make our own seed dispensing bird feeders. We started sketching some ideas. We will collect the materials we need over the week and bring them in next week.