TRABUCO CANYON : Pet Project Helps Teach Life Science

Every school morning at 10:25, teacher Kent Martin opens the window to let the birds into his classroom.

Solid white or dappled gray, they flap to the floor, hopping and pecking around his pupils’ feet. In an instant, they take wing for the door, soaring into the sky and circling Trabuco Elementary School’s wooded, bucolic campus.

For four years, the daily lives and flights of Martin’s homing pigeons have been part of the school’s rhythm. Perched in a wood and chicken-wire cage he built onto a window, the birds act as companions, teaching tools and links to nature for his fourth-grade charges.

“Basically, the way I use them is in teaching science,” Martin said. “I also try to bring them into other things like math--for calculating mileage and so forth.”

Martin also sets the birds loose to fly laps around the school while he and his pupils do calisthenics and play games for their physical education class.

But the pigeons are more than props. They carry on the cycle of life for all of Martin’s pupils to see: Males and females make nests, offspring are born, mothers nurse their chicks, adult birds battle for pecking order and the weak die before the strong.

Martin’s students also learn how to feed, handle and be comfortable with the birds.

“If you let the pigeons go, you have to make sure you open the trap door,” stated 9-year-old Travis Allee. If you don’t open that trap door on the outside part of the cage, Travis explained, the pigeons can’t get back in when they’re done flying.

“My favorite part is just watching the kids and how they relate (the birds’ actions) to human behavior,” Martin said. “But, the hardest part is when one gets killed or doesn’t come back. . . . (The children) have seen them plucked out of the air by hawks and eagles. I tell them, ‘Well, that’s the food chain.’ ”

Martin, 30, became interested in homing pigeons when he and his brother raised and raced them while growing up in a small, northwest Iowa town. At one time, the brothers had 175 birds under their care.

After his first year of teaching at Trabuco, one of Martin’s friends sent him four birds from Iowa and, with the permission of the school district, Martin was allowed to build the birds a home outside the window.

“Even though they came from Iowa, I think they got acclimated to California right away,” Martin said. “We had babies in no time.”

If there was any school where the birds would feel at home, it would be Trabuco, which maintains stables, pens and coops for horses, ponies, peacocks, chickens, geese, ducks, rabbits and a goat. It sits along tree-shaded and winding Trabuco Canyon Road and is surrounded by O’Neill Regional Park in the quiet hills east of Mission Viejo.

Martin and his pupils have cared for 40 birds over four years. Some have died, some have flown away and some Martin has given to or traded with other homing pigeon enthusiasts.

Now, the cage outside the window has 13 birds, including two newborn chicks nestled in a dog dish filled with straw.

“They’re right there,” Martin said as he stood by the window, “in front of all the kids’ eyes.”