Little Masters Club is a non-profit group that seeks to help “children discover their potential and develop the skills to be successful adults.” The focus is on parents and children learning together and creating community with others who speak Chinese. This was evident during the two days that volunteers from the Youth Education Committee (YEC) spent with them.
This year’s Christmas Bird Count will be held on Saturday, December 14. This will bethe 120th year of the CBC, which is sponsored by the National Audubon Society. It will be the 36th year for Eastside Audubon’s count. Count Day is always a special day when chapter members work together as a unit with teams of 3-6 people covering 14 sections of a 15-mile diameter circle in our service area. All the birds seen or heard that day will be tallied and entered into the huge National Audubon database for the combined U.S. CBC.
By now most readers will have heard of the study published by the Science Journal in October, which reports a loss of 3 billion birds, resulting in a reduction of 29% since the 1970s level of bird abundance in the United States and Canada. The study, a joint project of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the American Bird Conservancy, reports an astounding loss of bird life on our continent.
While attending the Western Field Ornithology conference in August, I decided to try something new and skipped the field trip one morning to participate in a bird banding workshop. It was my first experience with bird banding, and it was a treat to see birds close-up and hold a live bird in my hand!
We had special guests this month. The enthusiastic and totally awesome Cub Scouts Pack 425 joined us to build fantastic mulch “doughnuts” around native plants. It was a lot of fun working with them. They have great teamwork skills and ask fantastic questions, including “What is mulch made out of?” and “Is this an invasive species?”
