Pigeon Café

Opening Discussion

The day before conducting this activity, hold a brainstorming session with your children around these questions: What do you think pigeons LIKE to eat? What foods do you think pigeons DON’T LIKE to eat? When you have a sufficient list, ask them to choose 3–5 different foods from the “like” list, and 3–5 from the “don’t like” list that they might use to test their predictions. Try to have a variety of foods (ex. 6 different kinds of snack chip won’t yield very interesting results). Tell your kids that tomorrow, they’ll be testing these foods with real pigeons and recording the results.

The Challenge

Can you design an experiment to discover what kinds of foods pigeons most like to eat?

Doing the Activity

1. Have children pair up for this experiment. If you are working with very young children, you may do the activity as a whole group. Remind the children that they will be observing the pigeons in this experiment. Any behavior that involves chasing the birds, throwing things at them, yelling at them or disrupting them in any way could negatively impact their experiment’s results. For this reason, it is very important that they are only watching from a safe distance and not interfering in any way.
2. There are several ways that this experiment could be carried out—use your own judgment, and be creative if you’d like. A basic setup involves placing evenly-spaced piles of the different foods in a row, then stepping back and watching what happens. There are several things that you could have children tally; Which food did the pigeons try first? Which food did the most pigeons try? Which food was finished first? Was there any food that the pigeons tried but did not return to? What sorts of behaviors did you notice?
3. It might be a good idea to have children focus on one thing, particularly if you are working with younger (6–8 years old) kids. You could have them pick a pile of food and tally how many different pigeons eat from their pile, you could have them choose a pigeon and have them watch only that pigeon, tabulating which foods that pigeon tries first and which foods that pigeon seems to keep pecking at, etc.

Let’s Talk About It

When the experiment is done, bring your students together and have a discussion about the results. Were the initial predictions proven true? Did any results surprise them? What do the foods that the pigeons liked have in common? How are they different from the foods that the pigeons did not seem to like? What do those uneaten foods have in common?

Build On What They Talked About

Having tried this experiment once, ask your students if there are any other foods that they think the pigeons might be interested in. What did they learn in this first experiment that causes them to choose these other foods as ones they think the pigeons will like? Are the pigeons attracted to color, smell, shape, texture, etc.? How could you design an experiment to figure out the answer? If you are working with older children, you could also have them display the results of this experiment as bar graphs, pie charts, etc.

Once you have talked about the results, plan a second experiment to answer some of the questions discussed above.