Turning once again to my trusty Book of the Camp Fire Girls, circa 1913, I find instructions for a Bird Hunt Breakfast. This little jaunt will get you out in nature and help you learn something about our feathered friends:

The writer starts out on a note of sympathy. “We all feel sorry, and justly sorry, for children and dogs that have to live cooped up in a city apartment with no out-of-doors to play in. . . . There is no fun in the whole world like the fun to be had out-of-doors.” To that end, she suggested the Bird Hunt Breakfast.

“Did you ever had a Bird Hunt Breakfast?” she asks. “It sounds as if you went out early and found a robin or a hummingbird and fried him up for breakfast, doesn’t it? {ed.: facepalm!} Well, it does not mean quite that. {ed.: sigh of relief}

“You do go out for a walk early in the morning, when the trees and the grasses are still wearing their pearl earrings, and you do hunt, not with a gun, though, but with your eyes, plus perhaps some field glasses, and find an early robin and some warblers and many other kinds of birds. And instead of scrambling or frying them for breakfast, you write down their names in a book, and after each name you write down the characteristics of the bird, or if you don’t know the name of the bird, you just write down a description of it, so that you can identify it with your bird book later.

“Perhaps your group has divided into teams, and the team that sees the greatest number of different kinds of birds has the privilege of sitting down and resting while the other team cooks the breakfast over a fire. . . . Sometimes the girls have a Bird Hunt Tournament. They go for early morning bird hunt walks once or twice a week all summer and each girl keeps her list. When the final scoring comes, each girl must have identified from her notes each specie she has seen. The girl who has the longest list (with no repeats) wins the tournament.”