MORGANTOWN — With the Easter weekend happening, most people are thinking about Easter egg hunts and plastic eggs filled with candy. At the West Virginia Botanic Garden, however, kids got to think about different kinds of eggs March 31.
The Avian Conservation Center of Appalachia hosted an Egg Day presentation, an educational look into birds and their eggs. The kids were presented information about the structure of the egg and got to ask and answer questions about what they knew about eggs.
Kids learned there’s a lot more to eggs than a chicken egg that people commonly think of. They were shown there are eggs of all shapes and sizes, ranging from an egg that looks like a ping-pong ball (which is a screech owl egg) or the egg of a turkey vulture, which is much larger. The children also learned birds have different eggs for different ecosystems.
The crowd got to enjoy meeting a couple of birds as well. First they were introduced to Crystal. Crystal is a screech owl, a very small kind of owl that is indigenous to West Virginia. After Crystal returned to her cage, a much larger bird named Tundra, a peregrine falcon, was introduced to the kids. The educational birds are birds that cannot be returned to the wild because of injury. Crystal is blind in one eye, and Tundra suffered a wing injury.
The program ended with the kids doing a craft relating to eggs, and they had the opportunity to ask questions and take the eggs they made home with them.
