Bird Academy at Bristol Bay School in Naknek, AK

The Becharof and Alaska Peninsula National Wildlife Refuges offered the Audubon Society's "Bird Academy" for the first time to King Salmon and Naknek, Alaska residents and students. The course is a two-part program. Adults are taught first on how to teach the course to elementary students. The newly trained adults are then given the opportunity to teach what they have just learned. In this case, five adults were trained during the evenings of September 18th and 19th. The course was then taught to two 2nd graders, 16 3rd graders and 18 4th grade students on September 19th and 20th.  The course was so popular that we were invited back on September 21st to teach the 7th grade class. Activities included "What makes a bird a bird?", "Sing & Call", and "Building a Seabird." The students also took part in a discovery hike and visited the "Mud Flat Cafe" to learn what birds eat. In addition, the older students took part in "Mission Migration" to learn just how incredible the annual bird migration is. All in all, some pretty complex material was covered but you couldn't tell by all the fun they were having.