But Can I Tease A Weasel! Never Smile at a Monkey by Steve Jenkins

And a final word of advice:

NEVER smile at a monkey

But monkeys are funny! Why not smile at their antics?

Noted author-illustrator Steve Jenkins' Never Smile at a Monkey: And 17 Other Important Things to Remember (Houghton Mifflin) has the answer:

If you smile at a rhesus (ree-sus) monkey, it may interpret your show of teeth as an aggressive gesture and respond violently!

Jenkins' latest arresting picture book combines wonderful paper collage illustrations reminiscent of Eric Carle with nature lore about some of the world's exotic and intriguing animals. Never pat a platypus? It is nature's only poisonous mammal, equipped with spurs spouting venom on its hind legs. Never jostle a jellyfish? Most jellyfish can sting, but the box jellyfish's sting can be swiftly deadly. Never caress an electric caterpillar? Its hairy bristles can induce severe illness and death. And NEVER swim with a squid. Especially if it's a Humboldt squid. Why? Yikes! You don't want to know!

In appealingly alliterated advice to the wildlife novice, Jenkins' beautiful full- and double-page spreads impart information about some of the world's rare and not-so-rare animals. Luckily, most of these animals--the cassowary, spitting cobra, cane toad, and cone shell--live far from our shores and aren't a threat in our daily lives--except for the tang, a favorite aquarium fish which is equipped with slashing spines. So if a tang flops out on the floor, don't try to pick him up with bare fingers! Never touch a tang! Many--the hippopotamus and kangaroo--are usually safe inside zoo enclosures where we can't even think of harassing or confronting them, so most of Jenkins' readers can be informed but need not be worried. (And you Aussies already know about cassowaries and cone shells and the like, right, mates?)

Jenkins offers a very informative afterword which explains why nature equips animals to find food and fend off predators. Each featured animal is shown in the order presented in the main text with an explanation of its behavior in the wild. For early elementary nature study, this short and irresistible book is a natural, imparting information while delighting the eye and inspiring wonder at the natural world.

Eco Mazes: 12 Earth Adventures by Roxie Munro

WHEREVER ON EARTH YOU FIND YOURSELF, YOU ARE PART OF AN ECOSYSTEM!

And for those kids who prefer to be doing something rather than reading about it, Roxie Munro's EcoMazes: 12 Earth Adventures (Sterling, 2010) is the next best thing to taking a nature walk through twelve of Earth's amazing biomes.

Concentrating on the fauna of these far-flung areas--both polar regions, a Middle Eastern desert, a coral reef, an Alpine high meadow, a Eurasian tundra, South American rain forest, a North American wetland, and African savanna, to name a few-- her large-format new book provides a great jumping-off place for the study of twelve diverse ecosystems. Each double page spread provides maze-like trails for young naturalists to follow and a list of native animals to spot as they make the trek. Kids who love Where's Waldo? or I Spy books, as well as mazes and other visual puzzles, will quickly jump in to be the first to arrive at the finish line with the complete list of sightings, a few easy to spot and others well hidden in the natural environment. Some, such as lions and camels, are familiar to most kids, but others, such as the fennec and roseate spoonbill, may send them to reference sources to find out just which unusual animal they are watching for along the trails.

If anyone is stumped by the search, there are "solution" maps in the appendix to help them spot missing animals, each one offering a brief, clear description of the ecosystem along with the sights and sounds (a glacier "calving" in the polar Antarctic biome, for example) to provide a "you-are-there" experience for young readers as well as a brief list of the sites where each ecological area can be located on the globe. The appendix also offers recommended books and web sites for further study, making this useful book a great adjunct to the curricular study of Earth's many ecosystems.

Fun on the Web: An Australian Outback Food Chain: A Who-Eats-What Adventure by Rebecca and Donald Wojahn

Your small plane flies over the Outback just as morning breaks. Out the window, you see huge expanses of red earth. Nothing else as far as you can see. The Outback is the inner region of the country of Australia. It is one of the flattest and driest places on Earth.

Such a desolate view sounds as devoid of all life as a Marscape. But this barren landscape is home to a fascinating web of rare and exotic animals with their own closely interconnected society, each relying on the others for their very life.

Dying of thirst in a place where good rains may be years apart? There's the water-holding frog which can form a cocoon-like covering of new skin, burrow underground, and wait--for years if need be--for the next rain. Find one and you've found a quick quencher. Or if you are a predator with opposable thumbs and a tool-making brain (that would be us,) you can tap a baobab's thick trunk and have a life-saving draft.

If digging out a cocooned frog or drilling through steel-like bark is not your thing, perhaps your body can learn to recycle your own water supply, like the spectacled hare-wallaby, who can recycle the moisture from his own cooling panting back to his stomach and who is also blessed with the natural world's most efficient kidneys.

Australia is famous for its animal oddities--egg-laying mammals like the echidna, the fearsome saltwater crocodile, and the eucalyptus-loving koala, and Rebecca and Donald Wojahn's An Australian Outback Food Chain: A Who-Eats-What Adventure (Follow That Food Chain) (Lerner, 2009) is filled with lavish color photographs of these various Outback animals in action in their challenging environment, each intriguing entry providing more than enough fascinating facts for those elementary research reports or for an awesome animal adventure between the book's covers.

But there is an interactive feature which will further attract reluctant reader-scholars. Subtitled A Who-Eats-What Adventure, the book invites kids to select one of four tertiary consumers--a dingo, saltwater croc, wedge-tailed eagle, or Gould's monitor--in the familiar choose-your-own ending format, and track this predator's food chain through secondary consumers and primary consumers to the producers and decomposers who make its daily diet available. In another link to the interactive video game model, some choices lead to a DEAD END when the dietary endeavor ends in a gravely endangered or extinct Outback resident, (a gustatory GAME OVER, so to speak).

The book's design makes its generous information easily accessible with flow charts, diagrams, and informational text boxes placed throughout the text and with boldface type for animal names and scientific terms introduced in the text and repeated in the glossary. Other items in the backmatter include "Further Reading and Websites," "Selected Bibliography," and an index.

In addition to such stalwarts of ecology studies such as A Desert Food Chain: A Who-Eats-What Adventure in North America (Follow That Food Chain), the excellent Follow that Food Chain series includes such exotic ecologies as A Galapagos Island Food Chain: A Who-Eats-What Adventure (Follow That Food Chain) and A Mangrove Forest Food Chain: A Who-Eats-What Adventure in Asia (Follow That Food Chain).