"A child who can't tell the difference between a thrush, a swallow, a blackbird or a skylark is as sad as those children who had never seen a bee."
The Robin is our example of a medium bird. They painted pictures of the Robin accurately and we listened to its call from our Backyard Birdsong book. We will be adding these pictures to the field guides they are making for themselves. We also talked about how birds have something that birders call "jizz." According to Finding Your Wings jizz is "a subtle, characteristic combination of its size and shape, its position and its ways of moving. A bird's jizz is the impression it gives you, often so subtle that you can't describe it to others but also so definite that you know the bird, even at a distance." (p. 20) We talked about how Robins often walk tall with their breasts out when they stop, and then hop a few times, and then stop again, with that tall stand again. Then there is the classic picture of the Robin pulling up with a worm in its mouth, often with the quote, "The early bird catches the worm." This is the Robin's jizz, I believe.
