After spending a recent Saturday morning learning about birds and bees, the girls in kindergarten through third grade talked of going home to do their homework.
For the Daisy and Brownie Girl Scouts, that homework meant hanging the bird feeder and the home they made for bees and then recording what the birds eat over the next six days. They recycled plastic bottles for both projects in the session taught by Fort Bend County Master Gardeners.
The girls also learned about trees in the session at the Bud O’Shieles Community Center where they had the opportunity to earn their Design With Nature Badge, thanks to Donna Blackburn, Youth Activities Director for FBC Master Gardeners and her crew. Blackburn explained the Design With Nature Badge is a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) badge through the Girl Scout Council.
“We’ve worked with the Girl Scout Council before, but we’ve never done this type of badge,” said Blackburn. “We’ve always done gardening, animals and other horticulturally related events. But this is a relatively new badge.”
Blackburn said, “There is so much of the environment that they need to know about. This is one way to help them learn and get excited about and take care of the environment. It’s a newer approach to get them excited.”
Master Gardeners presented the topics followed by hands-on activities.
Eight-year-old Charlotte, a Brownie, said, “I had a great time today. I liked learning about birds.”
Nine-year-old Sophie, also a Brownie, liked learning about birds’ different beaks and how that determined their diet. Blackburn had the girls use a toothpick, spoon and clothespin to represent different beaks. With one arm behind them, the girls had five to seven seconds using one of the three tools to pick up their food: macaroni representing worms, raisins as grubs, marbles as snails and Styrofoam as water bugs.
Sophie said she learned about different types of seeds for birds – wrens and finches like millet, for example. “I also learned types of birds and bees and I know how to read a tree,” she added.
Tree reading came courtesy of Master Gardener Nancy Utech who brought cross-sections of a tree trunk. The girls then counted the concentric circles in the cross-sections to tell the age of the tree.
Among the moms attending the program were Kelli Bennett and Noreen Nawaz, both of Sugar Land.
Nawaz aimed to promote gardening skills in her five-year-old daughter Zaina. “I thought it would be really nice for them to learn some gardening skills. It’s a dying skill especially in urban areas.” Nawaz talks of her mom raising fruit trees, vegetables and herbs. “Us new moms – we’re busy working and running around with our busy lives and we don’t have the (gardening) skills.”
A physician who treats veterans with PTSD, Nawaz has observed that a number of patients have moved away from the city, started gardens and improved their health. “It’s a very pure way of living. The psychological benefits of gardening are tremendous.”
Bennett’s 8-year-old daughter Mallory is a “brand-new” Girl Scout. “She’s not very outdoorsy so I’m trying to push her to learn a little bit more about outdoor life. I don’t have a green thumb; I’m hoping she does. I’m hoping that by her coming here maybe she’ll get the bug.”
She also liked the mason bee program presented by Master Gardener Annette Beadles. “Bees are so important to our environment,” said Bennett. “Without bees we’re not going to be able to survive. They pollinate everything. They give us so much.”
Beadles said mason bees are solitary and don’t live in hives. They lay their eggs in tubes sealed with mud. Each girl received a plastic bag with a recycled water bottle, toilet paper tube, paper straws and other elements needed to build a nest. Mason bees are pollinators, she said.
Master Gardener Patti Lawlor gave the girls recycled plastic water bottles, string and a stick to build bird feeders. She talked of the importance of the 3 Rs: Reduce, reuse and recycle. She shared that experts predict by 2050 that the ocean will have more plastic bottles than fish if current practices continue.
Master Gardener Lynn Lucas introduced the girls to eight dishes of food for birds from peanuts to freeze-dried insects and encouraged each girl to take at least 10 spoons full of food with them to feed the birds when they got home. She talked about what different birds like to eat. Cardinals, for example, like sunflower seeds, while berries will attract mockingbirds.
Captions: Photos by Karen Zurawski
Fort Bend County Master Gardener Patti Lawlor of Sugar Land helps Girl Scouts select food to take home to feed the birds from the bird feeders they made.
Fort Bend County Master Gardener Rachel Kelesoglou of Katy helps Mallory Sophie, 8, figure out the age of a tree.