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NCERT Solutions for Class 5th The World Around Us Chapter 10 Story 1: The Travelling Birds! — Activity 2

Book page 165 Updated on2026-09-19

Q1.
1. Make a poster of 5 birds that visit your place in winter. Try to find out where they come from.
Answer

Choose five birds that really are winter visitors to India, draw or paste each one, and write under it where it comes from. A poster with five birds done properly is far better than one with fifteen names copied from a book.

How to make it:

  1. Take one chart paper and divide it into five equal boxes, leaving a strip at the top for the title.
  2. Title it “Our Winter Guests” and write your class and the year under it.
  3. In each box draw the bird, or paste a picture cut from an old newspaper or magazine.
  4. Under each bird write four short lines: name, local name, where it comes from, where we see it here.
  5. Draw a small arrow on each box pointing in the direction the bird comes from. Most of our winter birds come from the north.
  6. Ask a farmer, a fisherman or a bird-watcher before you finish, and correct anything you got wrong.

Sample poster — five birds that come to India in winter

BirdWhere it comes fromWhere you may see it in IndiaSomething to notice
Rosy starling (gulabi maina, tiliyar)Southern Russia, Mongolia and nearby countriesOver fields, on flowering trees, roosting in big trees at sunsetHuge flocks that twist in the sky; eats locusts and grasshoppers
Bar-headed gooseMongolia and Central AsiaLakes and river sandbanks in the north and centre of IndiaTwo dark bars on the back of its head. It flies over the Himalaya
Demoiselle crane (kurjan)Central Asia and MongoliaKhichan in Rajasthan, and fields in Gujarat and RajasthanVillagers at Khichan feed them grain every winter morning
Northern pintail (a duck)Siberia and Central AsiaVillage ponds, tanks and lakes almost all over IndiaThe male has a long, thin, pointed tail
Amur falconSiberia and northern ChinaDoyang, Nagaland — it stops there on its way to AfricaNagaland villages that once hunted it now protect it
Why we must find out where they come from: A bird's home is not only where you see it. This duck on your village pond may have hatched in Siberia. That is a fact you cannot get by looking — you have to find it out. And once you know it, the pond behind your school stops being just a pond. It becomes the last stop of a journey that began thousands of kilometres away.
Ask before you draw: Every place has its own list. On the coast you may add flamingos and gulls; near a big lake, pelicans and storks; in the hills, thrushes and redstarts. Put on the poster the birds your place actually gets.
Q2.
2. Using a string, trace the journey on a globe showing the paths rosy starlings take (Russia/Mongolia → India).
Answer

Tie one end of the string over southern Russia and Mongolia, and bring the other end down to India. Hold it flat against the globe and you will see the route bend south-west across Central Asia and come into India from the north-west.

How to do it:

  1. Take a piece of thick coloured wool about 40 cm long. Coloured wool shows up better than thread.
  2. Find Mongolia and the southern part of Russia on the globe. Press one end of the string there and hold it with a small piece of tape or a bit of clay.
  3. Bring the string down and to the left, across Central Asia — Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan.
  4. Bring it over the mountains and down into north-west India — Rajasthan and Gujarat.
  5. Tape the second end there. Now spread a shorter piece of string from there across the rest of India, because the flocks scatter after they arrive.
  6. Measure the string against the globe's scale, or simply say aloud how many countries it crossed.
Southern Russia · Mongolia summer home — the birds nest here Across Central Asia Over the mountains INDIA — winter home back again in spring south, every autumn
The route in simple form. On the globe the same journey bends south-west across several countries.
What the string showsWhat it means
The string is longThe journey is several thousand kilometres each way — roughly 4,000 to 5,000 km
It crosses many countriesThe bird passes over lands where different languages are spoken and different money is used. It notices none of this
It goes over high mountainsThe birds must cross cold, thin air and strong winds on the way
The same string works both waysThey come south in autumn and go back north in spring, along much the same path
Why a string on a globe is better than a line on a flat map: The Earth is a ball. On a flat map the distances near the top of the page are stretched and wrong. A string laid on a globe follows the real shape of the Earth, so it shows the real path and the real length. That is exactly why sailors and pilots have always used globes.
Try this too: With a second string of a different colour, trace the chilli's journey from South America to India (Activity 3). Now you have one string coming in and one going out — the beginning of the map you will make in Activity 5.
Q3.
3. Imagine you are a bird travelling the world. Write a short postcard or note about what you see and what helps you on your journey (wind, ocean currents, warm weather). Share it with your classmates.
Answer

Write it in the bird's own voice, and put in at least three things that help you on the way — the wind, the warm weather, and the places where you stop to rest and feed. Keep it short: a postcard has very little room.

What a good postcard must have:

  1. Where you started from and where you are going.
  2. Two or three things you saw on the way.
  3. What helped you — wind behind you, warm air, the sea, a lake to drink at, a field of insects, a tall tree to sleep in.
  4. What was hard — cold, storms, tiredness, hunger, hunters, or a wetland that had been filled in.
  5. One line about how you feel.

Sample answer

POSTCARD
Dear friends of Class 5,

I am a rosy starling. I left Mongolia six days ago with about four hundred cousins, because the grass there had turned brown and the nights had begun to freeze.

On the first day we crossed a yellow-brown desert with no water at all. On the third day we came to a wide lake and drank until our beaks ached. Yesterday we crossed mountains with snow on top. The air up there was so thin and cold that we flew in one tight ball to keep warm.

Three things are helping me. A strong wind is pushing from behind, so I glide and hardly beat my wings. The air gets warmer every day as we go south. And there are fields and lakes to stop at along the way — without them we could not do this.

Tomorrow we should reach India. There will be jowar fields full of grasshoppers, a warm sun, and a big peepal tree where the whole flock will sleep and shout together at sunset.

Please leave that tree standing. It is my house for the winter.

Yours, with tired wings,
Gulabi
To:Class 5, Government Primary School, Rampur, India, Planet Earth
Why writing as the bird works so well: The moment you say “I”, you have to think about what the journey actually feels like — the cold, the hunger, the wind, the fear. Facts you only read get forgotten. Facts you have felt from the inside stay. And notice the last line of the address: even a bird's postcard ends with Planet Earth.
When you share it: Read four or five postcards aloud in class and then ask one question — “Which helper did most people mention?” Almost everybody will have written about the wind. That is because it really is a bird's biggest helper: flying with the wind behind saves an enormous amount of strength.
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