Thursday, October 12, 2017

Learning is Fun!

We have another fabulous trip to Central America planned for next year.  Most of our trips are “birding” trips.  Our main goal is to see birds but that certainly isn’t all we find.  We look at butterflies, dragonflies, monkeys, frogs, snakes, etc.

I guess we really take “nature” trips with an emphasis on birding.  For us, it’s not enough to just let our guide tell us what we are seeing.  We want to know the birds we are looking for and be able to identify what we see.

We’ve traveled to Central and South America many times and are really drawn to that area of the world.  When we took our first trip in 2004 to Trinidad and Tobago we were going to see hundreds of birds that we had never seen before.  Mark thought up a wonderful way for us to study and learn these birds so we would know what we were looking at.

We went old school - flashcards.  After 13 years and many different countries we have thousands of flash cards printed up.

Mark is still printing up flashcards for new birds we will be seeing on our upcoming trip but this is (almost) all the birds we will be studying for now. 

 Flashcards for our upcoming trip.


Green Ibis
We’ve got 4 months of intense studying.  It’s really a lot of fun and keeps us excited about the trip.  I haven’t counted this 4” stack of paper (I don’t think I want to know).

Teri  

2 comments:

  1. I agree - learning is fun - but that is studying for all the exams at one time. Whew! Hopefully they'll be some overlap with what you already know! Looking forward to hearing more about your trip!

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    1. There is a good bit of overlap with birds we've seen (or at least studied) in the past. And even with brand new birds we're familiar with the families (parrots, hummingbirds, etc) and that makes it somewhat easier.

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