Fake Cats and Fair Experiments

Picture from Bird Sleuth Resource Pages. Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Today we looked at an experiment that was done by a middle school student in Oregon. It is on pages 8 & 9 in the Resource Pages from Bird Sleuth. She took a stuffed cat and placed it next to her bird feeder to see if it would scare the birds and keep them from visiting the feeder. We used her investigation to see if it was designed in a way that was fair and was actually testing her hypothesis. This will hopefully help us set up our experiments and investigations in a way that will get us closer to answering our own questions about birds. Everyone should be ready to start their investigations by Monday, October 31st at the latest. If they can start sooner, that is even better. They should run their experiments and systematic observations for at least 5 days in order to gather some good data. If they are looking at data from some of the online resources this will give them enough time to sort through what is out there figure out what they need to look at more closely.