Winter is a good time to become familiar with the most common birds in your area, because they are not hidden from view by foliage. Recess could become a time for discovering what types of birds are frequent visitors to your schoolyard. To help you and your students do that together, my suggestion is that you download the Merlin Bird ID app by Cornell Lab of Orthinology onto your phone. It's a big app but worth the memory space. Once it's installed, it works anywhere, whether you have WiFi or data or not. With it, yard duty will be much more fun!
When you and your students see a bird that you want to identify, the app asks you a few questions as explained in the video below, the same questions that birders generally use to ID birds: size and shape, color, behavior (including flight patterns), and habitat. Or you can choose the app's Explore feature that shows you what birds are likely around in your area at any particular time of year. The app even lets you listen to a bird's calls and songs!
You will see some species during winter that live further north in the summer. In the lower Great Lakes region where I am, for example, we get to enjoy the Dark-eyed Junco in winter. It is its most southern range. Come spring, it heads to the boreal regions to breed. A Dark-eyed Junco can be identified by its medium grey head and back, white bib, and the distinctively pink beak that some Juncos have. Another identifying feature of Juncos is that they are ground feeders.
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For the most part, though, there are fewer
species of birds around, so it is a less overwhelming time to get to
know the few around. Start with very common winter birds: cardinals, chickadees, Canada geese and blue jays, both the males and the females. Then up the ante with the various kinds of sparrows: house sparrows, chipping sparrows, song sparrows, black-throated and white-crowned sparrows, for example. That's already a worthy challenge.
Fun Fact: By the way, there are no such birds as 'seagulls'. There
are herring gulls, red-billed gulls, black-billed gulls, great
black-backed gulls and about 50 other kinds of gulls, but seagull is
just a slang umbrella term for them all.
As your schoolyard adds shrubs and trees, expect more birds to find themselves a happy home in it. You know you'll have made a great habitat difference once birds make nests and raise young there.
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