Bird Calls Sample Text

Tim and Abby, 11-year-old cousins, are curious about why their Grandmother painted a picture of a woodpecker believed to be extinct for 60 years.

Chapter Two: Bird Watching

(This is an excerpt)

I thought I’d stepped into the rain forest instead of my classroom the next morning. Birds warbled, screeched and whistled. It made me nervous since birds like to poop on my shoulder. But fortunately these birds were locked in cages.

“Take your seats,” Mrs. Lindsey shouted over the noise. “We have a special speaker so math will have to wait.” Wow, I’d wasted a whole half hour doing my math homework.

“Our guest is State Ornithologist Goldie Finch who brought some feathered friends,” our teacher said. “Dr. Finch has been interviewed a lot lately—since the Cape May Woodpecker was sighted. She’ll explain why everyone’s so excited about this bird.”

Dr. Finch looked a little bird-like herself. She had a sharp, pointy nose—like a beak. She bobbed her head like a robin when she walked. And her spiky hair resembled a bird’s nest. “Kik-kik-kikik!” she chirped.

No one saw that coming. A few of us laughed. Some snickered. “That’s how one woodpecker greets another,” Dr. Finch said.

“Can you really talk to birds?” Abby asked from the front row. She always sits there so she can see the board better.

“Not exactly. But I understand what they’re saying by their calls, plumage and body language.”

Dr. Finch picked up a cage with a little brown bird inside. “Who can guess this fella’s name?”

“Fred?” volunteered Brandon, the class smart-aleck.

“I’m looking for a species name,” Dr. Finch said. “We identify birds by their color and markings, plus something called GISS. That stands for General Impression, Size and Shape.”

“It’s shaped like compsognathus,” Brandon said. He has a dinosaur fixation with drawings of T-Rex, triceratops and iguanadon plastered all over his notebooks.

“Some scientists think birds descended from dinosaurs like velociraptor,” Dr. Finch said, walking around with the bird cage to give us a better look.

“But when we talk about shape we focus on how this song sparrow differs from this bird—a pileated woodpecker.” She stopped at another cage. A bird with black and white coloring and a red topknot peeked out. It was five times larger than the sparrow.

“Is that the one that’s extinct?” asked Ashley, a transfer student from Woodridge Elementary. She wasn’t the sharpest pencil in either school. “Extinct means there are no more like it,” Dr. Finch said. “But this is a distant relative. The Cape May species is larger with more white in its coat.”

“What happened to the Cape May?” I asked.

Dr. Finch switched on the projector, showing an old black and white photograph of a bird perched on a cypress branch.

“Hunters shot the birds for their feathers, and developers drained swamps where they lived,” Dr. Finch said. “The last confirmed sighting was in Florida in 1947. Then they vanished.”

Dr. Finch clicked to another slide of swamps and other habitats where the woodpeckers once lived. “One sighting, like the recent one, isn’t enough evidence to protect an area where mating couples might live.”

“Then what would it take?” Abby asked.

“We need a second confirmed sighting or visual proof, like a photo.”

(the story continues)