City Chickens
Children's Literature: Author Hepperman tells the story of Mary Britton Clouse and husband Bert who founded and run the Chicken Run Rescue in a suburb of Minneapolis. From Mary's first rescue of cockfighting survivors, these birds have been treated respectfully as sentient beings deserving of care and commitment. The number of birds needing rescue has […]
The Beetle Book
School Library Journal Gr 4–7—"Line up every kind of plant and animal on Earth…" says Jenkins at the start of his joyous celebration of beetle-mania, "…and one of every four will be a beetle." From the minute clown beetle to the gigantic titan beetle (its jaws are strong enough to snap a pencil in half), […]
The Polar Bear Scientists
Follow scientists as they scan the Alaskan wilderness for these magnificent creatures. It is springtime on the North Slope of Alaska, and the U.S. Geological Survey team—the polar bear biologists Kristin Simac and Mike Lockhart—is gearing up for polar bear capturing. During a capture, all information is collected on the sea ice. The scientists locate […]
Just a Second : a Different Way to Look At Time
Pamela Paul: Jenkins isn't here to lecture but to enlighten. With a dazzling array of science and nature facts on the order of Ripley's Believe It or Not, he succeeds in teaching children about time even as he's bound to pique their interest in a wide variety of behaviors, animal…human…and mechanical…the material is organized and […]
The Elephant Scientist
In the sprawling African scrub desert of Etosha National Park, they call her “the mother of all elephants.†Holding binoculars closely to her eyes, American scientist Caitlin O’Connell could not believe what she was seeing from these African elephants: as the mighty matriarch scanned the horizon, the other elephants followed suit, stopped midstride, and stood […]
Far From Shore : Chronicles of an Open Ocean Voyag
In extremely deep waters (two miles deep), the vast sea appears empty. But as naturalist and artist Sophie Webb shows us, it is full of fascinating—yet difficult to study—life. Together with her shipmates, Sophie counts and collects samples of life in the deep ocean, from seabirds to dolphins, from winged fish to whales. Only their […]
The Manatee Scientists : Saving Vulnerable Species
Synopsis InThe Manatee Scientists,John Reynolds does an aerial count of manatees from the Florida sky; Lucy Keith spends a weekend rescuing manatees trapped in a dam in Senegal; and Fernando Rosas takes the author on an Amazonian boat trip, looking for a young manatee he released back into the wild, with emotional results. These scientists […]
The Quiet Book
Added to the Lisbon Public Library in honor of Landon Kenneth Knox. Children's Literature: The animals arranged across the jacket, fingers on shushing lips, and the bunnies asleep under books on the cover, assure us that this is indeed a quiet book. Many kinds of quiet are noted, one per page, from: "First one awake […]
The Bat Scientists
School Library Journal Gr 5 8—This series entry takes readers along with Merlin Tuttle and a crew of BCI (Bat Conservation International) into bat caves and bridges, trees and houses to study these agile flitterers. Carson's readable, informative text dispels the ugly myths that have haunted these nocturnal hunter/gatherers, detailing bats' usefulness to humankind from […]
Project Seahorse
School Library Journal Gr 4?8?Project Seahorse follows the work of two dedicated scientists as they explore the life cycle of the tiger tail seahorse and forge partnerships with the people of Handumon in the Philippines to save its habitat. A full-page color map places the islands in their global context and shows the range of […]