INTRODUCTION

Studying different animals in the natural environment, naturalists need to identify species and track their behavior. However, they often deal with a problem of animals’ visualization, because they mostly hide in a grass or leaves, or underwater. Observing how do animals look like is the easiest way of their identification, however, there are several other effective ways. One of these ways is listening and recognizing animals’ sounds.

Recognizing bird songs is the unique way to identify their species because each song is special and we can listen to it even if birds are far away or hidden. Some mammals are also having special sounds, for example, dolphins or wild cats. Using songs and other sounds identification, scientists even studying migration and behavior of animals.  For students and tourists, skills of identifying bird songs and mammals’ sounds are also valuable, because they would know what species of animals are around recently and sometimes even what signals they send to each other.  

Another way of identifying birds is to recognize their silhouettes in the sky. Most big birds and some small birds have recognizable flying styles and silhouettes. Ornithologists know silhouettes of most birds and can identify species just by looking in the sky for a second. Birds are moving fast, and this skill is also valuable to have a chance to visualize them!  For students and tourists, we would say this is hard to identify birds by this method, however, it is possible for big birds and groups of small birds’ species. Special interest is a night migration of birds when pictures of birds’ silhouettes on a twilights or Moonlight background help to identify migrants.

RULES

The interactive stand can help students and adults to remember bird songs, mammal sounds, and bird silhouettes. It would be one stand with special magnetic cards, and each card has three paper covers – 1) picture of a bird with its species name, 2) picture of a mammal with its species name, and 3) picture of a bird silhouette. Or it can be three different interactive stands with the same principle of work.  Activities of remembering bird songs and mammal sounds have the same algorithm, and activity of identifying bird silhouettes has another algorithm of work.