For the last few years the New Haven Bird Club has offered a prize for bird related projects in the New Haven Science Fair.  The following was written by Mike Horn.  It is through Mike and Pat Horn's generosity that our prize is funded.

These are lovely and bright 4th graders from the John S Martinez School on James St in New Haven who won the New Have Bird Club $100.00 New Haven Science Fair prize for 2007. The title of their class project was "An Eggs-cellent Eggs-periment". The point of they experiment was to learn the natural choice of chicks for food. They were asked to guess (hypothesize) what type of food the chicks would eat. They weighed out various types of food to see how much the chicks would eat of each. They then recorded the data. Mrs Jennifer Danin, their teacher, did make sure that one of their choices was something that looked very much like Purina Chick Chow. As part of the project, they were given so fertilized eggs and made a successful incubator. The children seemed bright and eager to answer my questions and seemed to have gotten a great deal out of the project which reflects very well on their teacher, Jennifer Danin.

Yesterday, Pat and I received a package from the class containing about 23 large hand written thank you letters from Mrs Danin's fourth grade class. Pat and I will distribute them at the Centennial Dinner. They all start with a thank you to the NHBC and that they will use the $100.00 for science materials. But then they all put in individual notes about the birds in their lives. Some talk about their family birds, some talk about dissecting owl pellets others talk about the experiment itself.

The chicks ended up with a family who raise chickens as a hobby.

Mike and Pat Horn