DESCRIPTION

This page introduces the topic of birds' diets by showing how varied they actually are. Five foods can be offered to five different birds. Students can choose a food, and then choose which bird eats that food.

The themes that come out of "What Birds Eat" are given closer consideration on other pages in this chapter.

BACKGROUND

These birds have been chosen to be familiar, and very different in their diets, so students may already know the answers from their own experience. Songbirds are the most familiar birds to most students, and they do eat bird seed. To help students that may be merely guessing, suggest that they look at the shape of the beak as a clue. Beaks are adaptations to specialized diets, an idea that is further explored in the activity "Beaks are Tools."