Art, Design, and Biology

Introduction

I grew up hating birds. They’re loud, they’re everywhere, and they release their bowels when and wherever they choose. In contrast, there are many people who dedicate many hours observing, identifying, and cataloguing these winged beasts. After spending hours of dedicated research to learn about them and their adaptations, I understand those who, past and present, make the choice to identify and learn about the birds they encounter every day. Birds are fascinating in that there is so much diversity and variety to learn about. Even within one area, there are so many different birds to observe and learn about how they survive in their habitat.

Myself aside, people have been fascinated by birds for centuries. While this is mostly because of their ability to fly, birds also “inhabit every continent on Earth.”¹ It can be difficult to observe animals outside of a zoo environment, but birds are different in that they are one of the most accessible animals for people to observe even in an urban environment. Every person, regardless of where they live, has encountered at least one species of bird. Most encounter multiple species daily. Because of this, using ornithology, the study of birds, serves as the perfect entry point for students to begin discussing animal adaptations. I teach 6- and 7-year-olds, so connecting their learning to their daily experiences is of utmost importance. If they cannot connect their learning with their short life experience, they are unlikely to care about it.

That said, this is why the “Animal Adaptations” unit is one of the most popular units of the year in first grade. Students love learning about animals they already care about, and teachers get to foster the natural intellectual curiosity. Rather than the abstract thinking we often ask them to do, animals are concrete and appear in many of our students’ lives because they have pets or have been to the zoo on a field trip. Animals are easily observed in a variety of ways, whether that be while walking down the street or on the zoo live-cam. Students are interested in the natural world because it feels real to them. It is something they can literally touch and experience in many different contexts.

Typically, the animal adaptations unit begins with introducing animals from exotic locations like the Arctic or the African savannah. We discuss more commonly known animals like turtles, frogs, and wolves, but rarely do we discuss animals that students could watch while sitting on a bench at the playground. This is where birds fill a hole in this unit. They act as the perfect segue into talking about animal adaptations. Starting in a more grounded, easier to experience set of animal adaptations allows students to see themselves as the observers. They are the scientists learning from the natural world around them rather than reading from a text about a world they may never get the chance to experience.

By watching birds, students will experience seeing animal adaptations in the real world. They will see birds search for food, interact with each other, and escape from predators like cars, humans, and the occasional squirrel. Watching and studying birds will act as a “threshold to the larger natural world beyond our doorstep.”² Studying avian adaptations will act as a gateway to thinking about more exotic animals. Understanding how birds interact in our own ecosystem will allow us to dive deeper into how other animals interact with environments we are less familiar with.

Using art to help students understand avian adaptations puts them in the mindset of an early scientist. Before humans had cameras and other scientific tools, they used the power of watching. They watched behavior and made observations based on that behavior. Further, scientists took those observations and studied specimens to determine what made them the same and what made them different. After completing these studies, artists recorded their observations. Birds are the best subject for students to begin studying this practice because they “have played an essential role in helping humans decode nature.”³ Additionally, because birds are one of the most diverse groups of animals, many aspects of animal adaptations can be covered when studying birds alone.

As technology advances, scientists and artists have been attempting to capture birds as accurately as they can. As ornithology developed over time, scientists have been able to study the anatomy and behavior of birds to determine which adaptations allow them to survive in their various environments. One of the hallmarks that joins art and science is the concept of close looking. Students will become observers of nature in the same way that artists and natural historians of earlier times were. They will use what they see to make determinations and inferences about avian adaptations. They will compare and contrast the depictions of birds in art to determine what artists want their viewer to know about the bird subject.