Bird Mania

By: Heather, Courtney, Ishrath

Heather, Ishrath, and Courtney did a KIC research about birds. We became interested in this topic because at the current time, we were researching about this topic and had many questions. During our research, we attempted to answer these three questions: Which types of birds prefer which types of foods?; Now that their favorite is gone, which one is their second favorite?; If there are two brands of one type of food, which type do the birds like?

Some background information that we had is that House Sparrows are the most common birds to come to feeders. We also knew that we would get the most precise results if the feeders were placed at about the same height and if we had the same type of feeder (2 liter soda bottles). Another thing we knew is that Mourning Doves usually prefer ground feeders. They will eat the food if it is spread along the ground.

In order to research our topic, we needed to bird watch for 10 minutes. We put four different bird seeds in four 2 liter soda bottle feeders. Then, we hung these at about the same height in the same tree. Each morning, someone would come to school early to mark how much food the birds ate on the feeders or fill them up if they were empty. Then someone would start bird watching. The same person would see if anything changed. If seed ran out, we would get more and put the seed in a different feeder. We would hang the feeders on the same tree and in the same spot. We changed the spots three times to see if the results would be different. Then, we recorded the data on a chart. This is how we researched our topic.

We came upon many problems while we were conducting our research. A couple of times we ran out of food and didn't have time to buy more. Other times we couldn't get the feeders down. One other problem we had was that birds were eating only one type of food.

From our research, we found that most birds preferred Song 'n Beauty mixed seeds from Home Depot. We also found that black-oiled sunflower was the second favorite. Safflower and shelled sunflower seeds were the least favorite food. We think that if there were more types of seeds, the results might be different.

We also found that House Sparrows were the most common birds to come to our feeders, followed by House Finches and then Starlings. We had a Cardinal and Mourning Doves feeding off of the ground.

In the future, researchers may want to give wild birds only mixed seed. If they do this, they'll save more money. Also, we don't know if many birds will come because some birds don't like mixed seeds.

In the end of our experiment, we found that our hypothesis was incorrect. As we went along, we had more questions to answer and they were answered

correctly. Therefore, most birds preferred mixed seeds more than the other choices as their food source.

For our references, the group used two Internet websites and an article from the World Book Encyclopedia.