"True," you say again, "but I cannot beg or borrow any mounted birds."
Then take the alternative. Buy from the Massachusetts Audubon Society, 234 Berkeley St., Boston, for a dollar, one of its Audubon Bird Charts. This chart is printed in bright colors and is accompanied by a little pamphlet describing the twenty-six common birds that are figured. These are the (1) Downy Woodpecker, (2) Flicker, (3) Chimney Swift, (4) Ruby-throated Hummingbird, (5) Kingbird, (6) Bluejay, (7) Bobolink, (8) Red-winged Blackbird, (9) Baltimore Oriole, (10) Purple Finch, (11) American Goldfinch, (12) Chipping Sparrow, (13) Song Sparrow, (14) Scarlet Tanager, (15) Barn Swallow, (16) Cedar Bird, (17) Red-eyed Vireo, (18) Black and White Warbler, (19) Yellow Warbler, (20) Catbird, (21) House Wren, (22) Chickadee, (23) Golden-crowned Kinglet, (24) Wood Thrush, (25) American Robin, (26) Bluebird. Cut the birds carefully from the chart, back them with cardboard, and either mount them on little wooden blocks, like paper dolls, or arrange them with wires, so that they can be fastened to twigs or bushes.
You will be surprised to find how this scheme will interest the children, who may be allowed sometimes to place the birds themselves.
For those too old for the cut-out pictures, the teachers' edition of 'Bird-Life', with the colored plates in portfolios, will be found invaluable. The separate pictures may be taken outdoors and placed in turn on an easel behind a leaf-covered frame, with excellent effects—a few natural touches and the transition from indoors out often changing one's entire point of view.
One thing bearing on the question of bird study. If children ask you questions that you cannot answer as they surely will, do not hesitate to say "I don't know." Never fill their minds with fables guised as science, that they must unlearn.
Now a material point. When you have entertained your class for an hour, never more, lend the affair a picnic ending and give them a trifling lunch before they go; something very simple will do—cookies and milk, or even animal crackers!
The young animal of the human species, as well as many others, is a complexity of stomach and brain, and it is well to administer food to each in just proportion.
M. O. W.
Reports of Societies
WISCONSIN SOCIETY