And if learning under trees wasn't enough to convince me, Catherine says that birds are an important part of student life at The Nature School.

One way is actually written into our teaching programs, and that might not just be a science lesson.

It could be in English, or it could be in mathematics.

So a good example might be our year three students have been looking at Jeannie Baker's beautiful picture books.

I think every child in Australia at some point has read Where the Forest Meets the SeaBut they've been looking also at books like Circle, which feature a bar-tailed godwit and its, um, journey from, you know, Alaska all the way down to Australia.

And so when year three are on their adventure days then, they're looking for bar-tailed godwits, which they know about from the book, and their maths lesson on the adventure day is actually looking at the different lengths and shapes of shorebirds and how that beak is designed to reach the prey item, the shellfish, that are available on the, um, the wetland and estuary kind of areas around Port Macquarie.

So suddenly we've got a really engaging mathematics lesson that's actually about birds at the same time.

One of the joys of Katherine's job is experiencing birds alongside her students.