The birds are calling — and these kids are answering.
At Learning Gate Community School in Lutz, students have been participating in bird banding.
The work is led by environmental resource teacher Jim McGinity, who uses mist nets to capture birds and band them with tiny tracking nodules. For five days a month each fall and each spring, McGinity and some volunteers take students, of all grades, out into the 30 acres of woods on the campus, at 16215 Hanna Road, to look for birds in the nets.
They’ll collect the birds, bring them back to a small learning center, band the birds and then safely release them.
Over a dozen years of doing this project, McGinity has banded more than 900 birds.
The exercise provides a unique opportunity for students to witness, first-hand, how real scientists conduct fieldwork.
“It is hard to measure the value of the students seeing science in action,” McGinity said. “They can read about science in a book, but to watch it live is something completely else and, usually, they learn more this way.
“The hands-on — to an extent — experience of seeing the entire process of actual fieldwork is perfect for them, and, as they get older, we’re recapturing some of the birds from a couple years ago or even four years ago, so tracking the migratory patterns — it’s working! It’s proving the fieldwork is working.”
McGinity emphasized the birds are not harmed in any way, nor do the students handle the birds out of the net or when they’re banded.
McGinity is a fully licensed and trained bander, which required substantial training and experience to become completely certified to run the program and handle birds.
“We are one of hundreds of banding projects in the country, but also one of the few, if maybe the only one that is a bird-banding project on a school campus,” McGinity added.
Once a bird is safely removed from a net, McGinity will identify its species, measure it, weigh it, determine the gender if possible, and band it.
The wooded area on campus is a stopping area for the birds during migration. During the fall, the birds are headed even farther down south and to other countries.
“We’re contributing to the greater knowledge of the migration of these birds,” he said.
The information is valuable, but the teacher said there’s a low percentage of birds that return. Of the thousands of birds he’s banded, only two of his have been found — at a different location where McGinity bands (Dunedin). One was found in Massachusetts and another in Minnesota.
However, at Learning Gate, it’s a well-received, extremely fun project for the students, especially when they hike out into the woods to search the nets.
“I really like bird banding because you get to learn about new birds,” fourth-grader Yza Blanco said. “It’s just really fun, and we get to spend time with our nature teacher (Mr. Jim).”
“Sometimes,” added fellow fourth-grader Kealan Cooke, “the birds go to one place and then go back to the same place they were before, and they keep repeating that over and over again.”
In the end, the students are more than happy to release the birds back into the trees. In fact, it’s their favorite part, one meticulously supervised by McGinity who places the bird on students’ outstretched hands, allowing the birds to happily fly away.
They fly away — back and banded — to the call of nature.
“(I’ve learned) that when they migrate, they have to rest in order to keep going to Brazil or Mexico, and that you have to be a professional in order to touch a bird,” Blanco said.
“My favorite part is releasing the birds,” Cooke said, “and I got to release one back in kindergarten!”
Published November 09, 2022
