Chapter 1: What is the Nature School and where is it located?
I'd love to start by sharing the acknowledgement of country that students from the Nature School and staff have co-written. Our school is on beautiful Biripi country in Port Macquarie on the mid-north coast of New South Wales and we share our acknowledgement like this.
We, the future generation, acknowledge and honour the Biripi Nation, the traditional custodians of this land from rainforest to ocean and warm golden sand. We respect all elders, past, present, emerging, from mountains to lakes and rivers surging. We respect all creatures, land, sea, sky, all that crawl and swim and fly. We respect all plants that grow to the sun, from tiny shoot to elder gum.
We, the future generation, acknowledge and honour the Biripi Nation.
Welcome to Weekend Birder. I'm Kirsty Costa and here together we notice birds. Imagine a school where students learn through wetlands, forests, mud, risk, curiosity and adventure. Well, listener friend, This school exists. It's called the Nature School. And birds are a huge part of student life there. The Nature School's principal is Catherine Shaw, and she's our guest today.
My first question for Catherine is one that I love to ask all my guests. How did you grow your interest in birds?
I'm really glad that my answer is I became interested in birds as a child because obviously now I'm a school principal and I work a lot with helping children connect with the natural world. And so for me, it's significant that it started in childhood. And I think it started just camping with my family.
My mum was an artist and I can remember her setting up paints and watercolour paper by the side of a stream. And my dad was probably bored, but he had an old set of binoculars and an old copy of What Bird Is That? And I probably felt more comfortable looking at the birds with my dad than picking up a paintbrush with my mom. And so I'd start looking through dad's binoculars.
And as a child, I was always looking for the colorful ones. I remember the front cover of that edition had a buff-breasted paradise kingfisher on the front. And it was only a year or two ago that I first saw that bird for the first time. And it took me right back to being a child and dreaming about all the colorful birds that I could possibly see through my dad's binoculars.
The nature school is in Port Macquarie in New South Wales, which is on the east coast of Australia.
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Chapter 2: How did Catherine Shaw develop her interest in birds?
And national bird week is firmly established on the nature school's calendar.
So if you're at a school where the principal's really into rugby, you know there's going to be a good rugby team. If you happen to go to a school where the principal is a bird nerd, you're probably going to gear up for a spectacular bird week. So that's what it's like at the nature school. It's the best week of the year. Everybody knows that's Kath's week. Just let her go.
And I get to run all kinds of great things. The kids turn up and there's activities in the playground every day. You can draw birds. You can weave things. There's binoculars out. There's books to read. There's nests on display. It's just really cool. And then we have our annual bird calling competition that week. And it's a buzz at the nature school. The kids know this is coming.
They are practicing hard for it. We have a beginner level, an intermediate level and advanced. I choose the species for beginner level. So it might be something really easy, like a bar-shouldered dove. And I teach the younger primary kids how to do that sound. And they all, every year they learn a new bird and now they know how to do an eastern coal sound.
And the older students choose their own bird. So they'll get up for the competition and say, my name's Catherine and I'm going to do the call of a noisy friar bird. And off they go. And for extra points, some of them will rip out the scientific species name as well. It's a proper competition. So we have a professor from the local university from CSU comes down and is one of the judges.
One of the seniors from the birding club is a judge. My husband's a bird and wildlife photographer, so he comes in as a judge. It's a very serious business and there are prizes, bird nerd pins, and we do crown the bird calling champion every year. We've had such cool calls.
I've got kids doing little penguins and kids doing brolgas and kids doing whistling calls that I would never imagine children and young people would have a crack at, but it's the most fun.
And the bird call champion of last year was Evie. Here is Evie's winning impersonation of a brolga's call. That's very impressive, Evie. Congratulations. Catherine has noticed that connecting to local birds has also increased her students' sense of belonging to community and to place.
There's significance in knowing who you are, where you live and what happens in your area. I don't know that there's much value in me at the nature school teaching children about cassowaries, for example. If my students were at the beautiful little rainforest school on Mission Beach, great, that would be a species they need to know about.
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Chapter 3: What makes The Nature School's approach to learning unique?
Did you notice? And now I often hear other kids go, oh, that was an alarm call. And so their eyes are up. They're looking, is there a bird of prey or is there a goanna around? They are actually learning to listen to what birds are saying to us.
One of the joys of Catherine's job is experiencing birds alongside her students.
It's really lovely taking children into the bush and seeing how they experience birds and other animals and what they notice, especially the way they describe birds. I love that I can tell you that's a Lewin's honey eater, but it's more meaningful that a child says to me, that's the pew, pew, pew bird. Pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew. It's like a Star Wars bird.
And so now we call it the pew, pew bird. Even in my bird's head, instead of ripping out the scientific species name for that bird, I go, that's the Lewin's honey eater, otherwise known as the pew-pew bird. The way that they notice it actually does make a lot of sense. And sometimes as adults, we can overcomplicate things. Or they say the Pacific bazaar has a mohawk. That's the mohawk hawk.
Like,
Great. Why didn't I think of calling a Pacific Bazaar the Mohawk Hawk? That's a great name for it. And I also love the joy that a child has the first time they experience a bird. And I think we can lose that really quickly as adults. I still got it that time I saw the buff-breasted Paradise Kingfisher, but I don't get it so much anymore when I see a Golden Whistler.
But the first time you show a child a golden whistler, a male golden whistler, it's like the coolest thing they have ever seen. And they're like, has this been in my backyard the whole time and I didn't know this thing existed? And they just stop for a moment. I love that. Wouldn't it be great if adults could reclaim a little bit more of that?
And perhaps that's why birding is so contagious for adults is because we get to reclaim a little bit of that wow factor that naturally children have and as adults we tend to lose. The day that I was watching a PE lesson and the whole lesson stopped because a bird swooped down and a kid went, square-tailed kite, and all eyes went up. A, the correct, the idea was correct.
I was really stoked with that. But B, the whole PE lesson just stopped for a moment to watch this bird. And then the ball was kicked and the game went on and I thought, my work is done.
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