Katie, I can think of a couple options for you for birds. One standard one is the North American Breeding Bird Survey data set, where data can be downloaded from here:
http://www.pwrc.usgs.gov/bbs/RawData/Choose-Method.cfm These data come from several thousand annual 50-point transects run throughout the U.S. and southern Canada. The data go back to 1966, from which they are available as counts of birds aggregated across all 50 stops. Starting in the late 1990s the data become available separately for each of the 50 stops. You will need to do some data manipulation to produce a data set workable for students, because the data come as separate tables describing the route, the conditions on the individual year, and finally the counts of birds for any and all species seen and heard. The second source of bird data that you should look at are from the Avian Knowledge Network (http://www.avianknowledge.net/content/download/prepackaged-data-options) that is warehousing data from several monitoring projects. The URL given above is the web page for downloading specific data sets, but you'll need to look at the documentation (http://www.avianknowledge.net/content/datasets) first to see what data sets are available from which regions, and click on any of the project names to get the associated meta-data (descriptions of contents of each column of data). The Avian Knowledge Network data come as flat-file tables that hopefully would require less pre-processing to make them usable for student projects. In either case, would likely need to trim down the data sets to make them manageable as the entire data sets will likely not fit within an Excel spreadsheet, if you were intending to have the students use spreadsheet manipulations for their projects' analyses. I hope these suggestions help. Wesley
