One of our reading-aloud books this year is The Burgess Bird Book for Children. This is a narrative-style book about common North American bird species.
My children love birds. I’ve found it helpful, as we read along, to keep the computer open at the Cornell ornithology website, so we can look at pictures of the birds we’re reading about, as well as hear recordings of their calls. To save time, I decided to make a web-linked spreadsheet of all the birds mentioned, organized by chapter in the book.
I stayed ahead of where we were in the book and finally got all the links in. Here it is:
Download burgess_spreadsheet.xls
Depending on where you live, you may wish to link to different birds. For example, Burgess writes about a generic "Tommy Tit the Chickadee." My entry for Tommy Tit links to the Black-capped Chickadee, because that is the kind of chickadee that is common to the Northern Plains states. But if you live in the Southeastern U. S., you might want to change that link to the Carolina Chickadee. (The two species look similar but have different songs.)
I’m offering no technical support on this spreadsheet, and you’ll notice that it contains other columns that I only partly have filled in (i.e., one for the binomial nomenclature) — feel free to complete these yourself. The part that you need to use the spreadsheet in conjunction with the Burgess book is done for you. Enjoy!
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