Analyzing
Weather and Robin Migration
Are robins
fair weather flyers or do they need a good push from behind? Which temperatures
get them up and out? Why not use your sharp eyes and minds to figure out
how different weather factors affect robin migration!
Over the
next few weeks, save the daily weather maps from your newspaper. (Or download
WWW-based
daily weather maps.) Watch where robins are reported in Journey North
Updates and see if you can discover any relationships between weather
and robin migration. Ask yourselves these kinds of questions:
- Do
robins seem to fly when it's cloudy or clear?
- Do
they seem to respond to wind direction or speed? How?
- How
do they respond to cold fronts? What about the storms associated with
low pressure systems?
- Do
temperatures seem to influence their migration?
- What
general statements can we make about weather and robin migration?
Try
This!
- Working
in teams or individually, try to identify how weather patterns or systems
might affect how far robins will migrate this week. At the end of the
week, study the new migration map. Which team most closely predicted
the week's migration? Which weather factors were most useful for predicting
it?
- Pay close
attention to the weather in your area. Each day, record the following
data for your city or town:
- wind
direction and speed
- barometric
pressure
- temperature
- sky
conditions
- rainfall
- What
is the weather like the first day your robins appear? Can you pose any
hypotheses from your data? How would you test them?
- List as
many reasons as you can to explain why robins time their migrations
as they do.
National
Science Education Standards
- Ask a
question about objects, organisms, events. (K-4)
- Use data
to conduct a reasonable explanation. (K-4)
- Organisms
have basic needs. (K-4)
- The behavior
of individual organisms is influenced by internal cues and by external
cues (K-4)
- Weather
changes from day to day and over the seasons. (K-4)
National
Geography Standards
- How to
use maps and other geographic representations, tools, and technologies
to acquire, process, and report information.
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