Bird watching as an alternative to chick hatching

Apr 7, 2000 4:03 PM

BIRD TRUE-FALSE GAME

1. False. Most birds have wings but some cannot fly. The penguin, ostrich, emu and kiwi cannot fly. The kiwi has no wings.
2. True. Birds also have backbones, are warm-blooded, and use lungs to breathe air.
3. False. All birds lay eggs. (Afterthought: True.- Male birds do not lay eggs!! The students may think of this)
4. False. Most birds eat alot in relation to their size. Some eat their weight in food every few days!
5. True. Hummingbirds can fly backwards. They can also hover in mid-air, fly up and down, and fly forward at seventy miles an hour!
6. True. A Bird's air-filled skeleton is light in weight, helping the birds fly more easily.
7. True. Insect-eating birds have long thin beaks. Seed-eaters have short far beaks. Meat-eaters have strong hooked beaks. Some birds eat several kinds of food.
8. False. The only place that birds are not found is in the center of the Antarctic continent.
9. False. The female's duller colors make her hard to see when she is sitting on the nest.
10. False. They need alot of room for flying, and being around people frightens them. It's hard to provide proper food for some birds. It's against the law to keep most wild birds aspects.
11. True. No other animal has feathers.
12. False. They have large eyes for their size and can see very well. They have a third eyelid that is transparent so when they blink to keep the eye wet, they can still see.
13. False. An owl's eyes can only look straight ahead. He must turn his head to look sideways or backwards. He can turn his head straight back but cannot turn his head in a complete circle.
14. True. Feet can be specially designed for perching (finch), running (ostrich), wading (flamingo), scratching (quail), grasping (eagle), swimming (duck), climbing (woodpecker) and attack or defense (owl).
15. False. Some birds do not build nests at all. Birds that do make nests may use roots, leaves, hair, reeds, twigs, sand, pebbles, moss, mud, string, feathers, cotton, rags, bark, or other materials.
16. True. Some birds' tongues are designed for special uses. The hummingbird has a thin tubular tongue for sucking nectar out of flowers, woodpeckers have very long tongues, barbed or sticky at the end, used for pulling insects out of holes or from underneath a tree bark.
    The thick flexible tongues of parrots and parakeets enable them to "talk" and imitate sounds.
17. False. It is used to scoop up fish from the water.
18. True. About twenty million mourning doves are shot each year.
19. False. They eat billions of insects, weed seeds, and rodents (mice, rats, gophers) which can destroy crops grown for human consumption each year.
20. True. Instead of having teeth to chew their crunchy food with, these birds have gizzards. The sand or gravel they swallow goes into the gizzard, which is like a strong muscular pouch. The gizzard squeezes and grinds the seeds that the bird swallow together with the sand, crushing the seeds so the birds can digest them.
21. True. They have to spend a great deal of time finding food and eating in order to get all the energy they need.
22. False. Some birds are helpless for several weeks after birth and need their parent to fee and care for them. Finches, wrens, robins, and jays are in this group. Baby ducks, chickens and quail, however, can run around, find food, and eat by themselves soon after they are born. The parent birds help protect them.
23. False. People are their worst enemy. People who shoot them, destroy their habitat, and use pesticides and poisons which pollute their food and eventually kill them. Many birds are on the endangered species list.
24. False. They do not do this. However, if a female sitting on her nest senses danger, she may stretch out her long neck along the ground, which makes her harder to see.
25. True. In cold weather, birds puff out their feathers to trap a layer of warm air around them. In hot weather, the feathers are held flat along the body.
26. False. The act of cleaning the feathers is called preening. Molting occurs once or twice a year, when a bird loses its old feathers ( a few at a time) and grows new ones.
27. False. Often the parent birds are nearby, watching the baby on her first flying lesson. If she is a very young bird and you can get her back to iher nest without hurting her (or you!), do that. If she looks like she's ready to learn to fly and an adult bird is watching her, only move if she is in a street or other unsafe place. No one knows more about raising birds than birds do! Don't take baby birds in unless they're injured or definitely abandoned.
28. True. Different birds use their beaks the way people would use tweezers, scissors, a hammer, a spear, a strainer, a nutcracker, a hook, a scoop, or a chisel.
29. False. The tiny rufous humming bird migrates from Alaska to South America, many thousands of miles. Other types of hummingbirds migrate too.
30. True. Birds such as jays and mockingbirds often swoop down at cats, snapping at them with their beaks and screaming to warn other birds of the danger.