It Could Always Be Worse? No! It Couldn't! I Am Not A Chair! by Ross Burach

ON GIRAFFE'S FIRST DAY IN THE JUNGLE, HE FELT SOMETHING WAS NOT RIGHT.

There was something on his back. Something heavy. Something VERY heavy.

It was Rhino.

All the other animals were sitting on normal  things--logs, rocks, tree stumps, clumps of grass--you know, jungle stuff.

Rabbit looks at Rhino, sitting on Giraffe's back.

"CAN I SHARE THAT CHAIR?" HE ASKED RHINO.

Giraffe looked at his back.

"I AM NOT A CHAIR!" HE YELLED.

Giraffe points out that he has ears, and eyes, a mouth, spots, and... pointing at his new little horns...

... "WHATEVER THESE THINGS ARE!"

But Giraffe gets no respect. What he gets is piled on by each one of the animals in turn, until he collapses. Big Hippo is the straw that breaks the... giraffe's back. Little Hippo tries to fix Big Hippo's "chair," but he puts him together all wrong. Now Giraffe's a roost for jungle birds!

"EEEEEENOUGH! I AM NOT A CHAIR!"

Hope returns as Giraffe spots a human driving by in his jungle Rover. Surely a human knows a giraffe when he sees one!

No, he doesn't. He snatches up Giraffe and plops him down in his house as an exotic TV chair.

Sheesh! Whoever said humans were the smartest species? Giraffe waits for the right moment and makes his escape.

Meanwhile, just down the jungle trail Lion is getting very hungry, and he's not the least bit timid about it.

"ROAR! THE NEXT ANIMAL I SEE WILL BE MY DINNER!"

WHOA! Maybe there are times, Giraffe decides, when looking just like a chair is a good thing, in Ross Burbach's latest, I Am Not a Chair! (Harper, 2017).  Burbach's silly story features growing improbabilities, one on top of the other, so to speak, with an even more nonsensical conclusion that will keep kids falling off their chairs as the giggles keep coming. Absurdity and sight gags reign supreme in Burback's second goofy giraffe tale, the companion to his popular There's a Giraffe in My Soup.

Living in the Fast Lane: Chasing Cheetahs: The Race to Save Africa's Fastest Cats by Sy Montgomery

A tall, smiling woman, her curly salt-and-pepper hair flowing like a mane, is striding toward us--with a ninety-pound black and gold spotted cat at her side. Walking on a leash as calmly as a dog is a predator who can run as fast as a car races on a highway. It's a full-grown cheetah--the fastest predatory animal on earth, and Africa's most endangered cat.

"I'm Laurie," says the lady in black, "and this is Tiger-Lily."

Walking on a leash is nothing new for cheetahs. They appeared in the tomb illustrations of ancient pharoahs doing just that, as favored pets and valued hunting companions. After all, a courser who can run at seventy miles an hour beside a chariot and bring down even the fleetest antelope is a rare animal indeed.

It was a long way from being a kid who loved animals--horses, dog, cats--to being cheetah expert in Namibia, but after a few months working in a local animal park, raising baby cheetahs, Laura Marker was hooked and had found her life's work with this amazing cat.

Today the cheetah, once found across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, has dwindled from a population of 100,000 in 1900 to 10,000 today, limited to a few arid plains in Africa, with an isolated population hanging on in Iran. Loss of habitat, poaching, and killing by farmers who fear loss of livestock has resulted in this reduced population, and biologists know that a limited gene pool can weaken a species beyond recovery. Animal scientists such as Laurie Marker, working with the Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF) in Namibia, do what is the typical work of science, observing behaviors, collecting specimens, identifying individuals, giving them annual health exams much like those humans get (although cheetahs require darting with a sedative first), and doing DNA tests to document their population, the basic science to understand and enable this species.

But scientists in the field working with endangered species have many other roles-- treating sick and injured cheetahs, raising orphaned cubs and introducing them back into the wild to spur population growth, and caring for those too habituated to humans to return to the wild. And in these times, conservation-minded scientists become a sort of social worker at the human-animal interface: Laurie has managed to reduce the killing of cheetahs by farmers dramatically, simply by offering them the chance to obtain dogs, specifically a large and hardy breed of herding dogs called Kangals, native to Turkey, capable of preventing stock loss completely. Laurie's station raises Kangals and makes pups available at low price to local farmers, and presto! cheetahs are no longer threats to farm animals.

As North Americans have learned, mass killing-off of our large predators, cougars and wolves, has led to overpopulation by their former prey, such as deer and rabbits, with a subsequent degradation of habitation that affects the environment negatively in various ways, as any vegetable and flower gardener can attest. In their habitat, cheetahs are essential to prevent overgrazing by herbivores, and one of Laurie Marker's roles is to teach farmers that their goats, sheep, and cattle depend on the cheetah to keep nature in balance to preserve their grazing lands, too.

Sy Montgomery's Chasing Cheetahs: The Race to Save Africa's Fastest Cat (Scientists in the Field Series) (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014) covers the science and the fun of working with college interns in a place where tame cheetahs stretch their legs chasing the van and trained "poop-sniffing" Aussie shepherds lead expeditions of cheetah-spotting and documentation, always hoping for a sighting of the camp's favorite wild male cheetah. Nicknamed Hi-Fi, this wily male admires "the Ambassadors," the resident lady cheetahs, but slips through the post, ghostlike, never menacing their goats, rarely photographed except by "camera traps."

This latest in the notable Scientists in the Field series takes middle readers to meet face-to-face with one of the world's most fascinating and appealing endangered animals.  Plenty of "Fast Facts" pages, such as "Cheetahs by the Numbers," provide substance to the engaging narrative of one of our star environmental warriors seeking to save this amazing animal from going extinct in this century.  This book is a must-have for school and public libraries and for nature-loving young readers. Included are a useful text and photo index and bibliography for student researchers, along with a plea from Laurie Marker to the casual reader:

"Don't wait for 'somebody" to do it. You can do anything.... Don't be afraid to take that first step! Animals need our help. If you don't take care of them, they'll go away."

Baby Elephant Walk: A Baby Elephant in the Wild by Caitlin O'Connell

Like all newborn elephants, Liza is hairy--much hairier than her older brother and cousin.

And the backs of her ears are bright pink.

Even her belly and toenails are pink.

And even though at birth she weighs 250 pounds and has the gray, wrinkled skin of a grown-up pachyderm, little Liza is every bit as winsome and adorable as any baby animal. Leaning against her mother's strong legs, she learns to stand soon after birth and walks in a few hours, and within the day she is able to keep up with her mother and the rest of their family group--an aunt, a half-grown brother, and young female cousin.

Looking tiny as she travels beneath her 8000-pound mother's belly for protection from the hot sun and from predators, her first journey ends at their watering hole, where she waits in line with earlier-arriving elephant families before she learns to use her trunk to get her first drink of water. Little Liza loves her first water bath and then is treated to a mud bath to protect her tender baby skin from insects and sunburn. The other females stay near to help if the baby should get stuck in the mud or slip into deeper water.

A baby female elephant will live with her mother for life. It will take Liza twenty-five to thirty years to get as big as her mother is now.

For as long as she is strong enough, her mother will protect Liza.

As they move across the Namibian desert landscape, Liza meets and plays with the other babies in their little herd and rests in whatever shade they can find while the adult elephants form a outward-facing circle around the sleeping little ones. Hunting lions and hyenas can cut a straggling baby elephant out of the group, and all the adults take a role in parenting the youngest ones. Besides the hunting animals, predatory poachers, killing for elephant ivory, can leave an orphaned baby, too young to survive alone, to starve.

But predators are not the only danger for young elephants. Once widespread throughout sub-Saharan Africa, elephants are now limited to the Congo basin and the Namibian scrub desert. Loss of food sources from wildfires, climate change, and forest clearing can eventually reduce their numbers to the point of extinction outside the protected preserves. Members of the ancient order Probiscidae, elephants and their ancestors have been on earth for 55 million years and may yet face extinction in this century without human intervention in their protection.

Caitlan O'Connell's photo essay, A Baby Elephant in the Wild (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), offers much information about this fascinating animal, so like humans in their long lives and close family relationships, in simple text easily accessible to the younger readers. Up close and personal photographs by Timothy Rodwell show the young elephant in her first few months of life, saying her first hello to her cousins with a trunk salute, learning to splash and play in the watering hole, and being baby-sat by her big brother just as a young human might be. Photographs appear in two formats throughout--as full-page photos and as appealing snapshots in mounting brackets "pasted" against a pink background, album-style.

For slightly older readers, see Caitlin O'Connell's The Elephant Scientist (Scientists in the Field Series) (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), an entry in the much lauded Scientists in the Field series and which was awarded the American Library Association's Sibert Honor Award for young people's nonfiction in 2012. In this book O'Connell traced the migrations of an elephant family in Namibia's Etosha National Park and published her groundbreaking research in elephant communication through ground vibrations.