Sorry, Darwin! Orangutan Hats and Other Tools Animals Use by Richard Haynes

MAN THE TOOLMAKER! So proclaimed natural history scientists until the last decades of the twentieth century.

Darwin himself had noted what appeared to be incidental tool use, but when Jane Goodall observed chimpanzees choosing and shaping twigs to extract high-protein termites from their mounds and demonstrating to their offspring how to do it, she realized that what she was seeing was a tool-using, tool-making culture being passed down through generations.

Soon researchers in the New Caledonian tropics observed native crows coaching the young into intentionally shaping stiff leaves into hooks to fish nutritious grubs out of logs. Once primed to look for that trait, nature scientists soon noted tool use among a wide range of animals, from the heron who dangles earthworms as lures for fish to primates who defend themselves by throwing rocks or coconuts and welding clubs and spears against preying lions. Nature science would never be the same.

Author Richard Haynes introduces middle readers to recent research into animal tool use in his fascinating book, forthcoming today Orangutan Hats and Other Tools Animals Use (Candlewick Press, 2021), divided into chapters on tools for hygiene, health and healing, hunting and harvesting, comfort and pleasure, with humorous and realistic illustrations of Stephanie Laberis. Beginning with cleanliness, Haynes describes how primates like chimps and gorillas use leaves as napkins, toilet paper, and handy-wipes for freshening their fur. They choose plant parts as toothpicks, and fibers for tooth flossing, including macaques who snatch hairs right off passing human heads for dental floss!

Tropical animals like hippos and elephants smear mud, dust, and leafy debris as a sunscreen on their wide backs, and elephants choose sharp sticks to loosen ticks from their skin. Spider monkeys use crushed ants and noxious millipedes as insect repellants. Other primates know the right leaves for disinfecting wipes, and orangutans know the best plants for poultices for easing pain.

And for defense against other animals, monkeys and apes are skilled at collecting and hurling objects--rocks, logs, and even feces--at enemies and fending off snakes and preying cats with forked or pointed sticks or dropped rocks. Small boxer crabs wave poisonous anemones in their claws. Sea otters put flat stones on their bellies, place a mollusk on top and batter it with a big stone until the shell is broken and the nuturitious meat is all theirs! Capuchin monkeys pound dry soil into dust with stones to get at roots and tubers. And then there are the probe makers--monkeys and apes have learned to probe or dig with prepared sticks. The bottlenosed dolphins of Shark Bay, Australia, use their noses to probe the shallow sea bottom for burrowing fish, teach their young to protect their tender noses by shaping live sponges to fit over them for foraging the rocky sea floor.

Animals also teach their young how to make themselves more comfortable. Noticing that branches can offer shelter from rain, orangutans figured out that separated from the tree, they became portable umbrellas to take along in the rain. Elephants select the best branches as fly swatters, and the tailorbird sews large leaves together to make homes for their brood. And just for fun, crows convert found objects like jar lids into sleds for sliding down roofs, and ravens choose objects for games of catch on the wing or as toboggans in snow. Animals as large as American bisons have been observed "ice-skating" just for joy of it.

Should we humans feel displaced from our lofty position as the only tool user on Earth? Or should we rejoice that we are not the only ones planning ahead on the planet? We share many characteristics with our fellow creatures which we now recognize, one of which is the ability to shape and use tools. As author Richard Haynes puts it...

"LIKE US THEY THINK, THEY STUDY, THEY CONSIDER. WHAT SEEMED IMPOSSIBLE IS NOW POSSIBLE, THANKS TO THE USE OF A TOOL.

Haynes also adds those helpful human literary tools, a glossary, bibliography, and index. Says Kirkus, "Readers will devour this dynamic and informative explanation of the inventiveness to be found within the animal world."

For more astounding books on toolmaking animal geniuses, see my reviews here and here.

The Fox Went Out on a Summer Night: Fox Explores the Night by Martin Jenkins

It's dark and cozy in her den when Fox first wakes, but a quick look outside tells her that it's still sunny midday, not a good time for a red fox to be out and about.

But when she wakes again, the sun is setting, and her hunger hurries her out for some foxy foraging.

It is not so easy to see in the dark, but when the moon peeks out from behind a cloud, she sees something that might be a meal--a mouse.

But the mouse is too fast for Fox.

She noses a cast-off pizza box by a trash can, but there's only a scent of food there. She trots on, only to be spooked by her reflection in a mirror in a shop window. She dodges the headlights of a speeding car which beeps at her.

That was close!

Fox follows the dark shadows into a alley, where her nose notices something tantalizingly tasty.

It's someone's barbecue pit, with the fire hot and glowing, and a plate of warm and juicy grilled chicken legs, left all alone on a table. And there, dropped on the ground, is a whole one--just right for a red fox's supper--as she follows the path in the moonlight back for a delicious dinner in her den.

Conservationist author Martin Jenkins' Fox Explores the Night: A First Science Storybook (Science Storybooks) (Candlewick Press, 2018) offers a bit of nocturnal urban wildlife adventure and a little treatise on light, from several sources, in this new American edition in the Science Storybook series. Now that foxes have taken up habitation close to humans in towns and suburbs, sharp-eyed young readers will be on the lookout for these shy mammals after reading this book.

Illustrations by Richard Smythe extend the text beautifully in frames and full-bleed night illustrations that show off the effects of different forms of light experienced in the nocturnal adventures of this charming little red fox vixen. Author Jenkins add a short appendix, "Thinking about Light and Dark," and a brief index/glossary that leads back to his text. Other books in this series offering basic animal science and easy reading experience are The Squirrels' Busy Year: A First Science Storybook (Science Storybooks) and Bird Builds a Nest: A First Science Storybook (Science Storybooks).

In the Beginning! Meet My Family (Animal Babies and Their Families) Laura Purdie Salas

All families are different. But in one way, they are all the same. They are all devoted to doing whatever they can do to help their babies thrive.

The ways they do that can be different. There's a world of difference between the much-made-over baby elephant, cared for by its mother, grandmother, older sisters, and aunts, and the poison dart frog tadpole carried solo on its father's back into the nearest puddle of water, but animal parents do what they have to do.

"I'm in charge of all my meals. I graze for grasses, just like all the elders do," says the rhino calf.

"I have to climb over all my brothers and sisters just to get dinner," says one little piglet.

"I'm the only kid around. Having Mama to myself is great, but I sure would like someone to race with," a young horse foal complains.

Baby orangutans are only children, cradled and carried by their mothers into the treetops and fed her milk until they are able to climb and pick their own fruit, but baby sea turtle hatchlings crawl from the sandy nests their mothers carefully dug on shore and make a dash for the sea all by their lonesome. But, then, parent albatrosses play tag team on twelve hour shifts so that their chick is always guarded.

Every family is different. Each family is just right.

Mother (or Father) Nature knows best, in Laura Purdie Salas' Meet My Family!: Animal Babies and Their Families (Millbrook Press, 2018). Author Salas juxtaposes many styles of parenting among the many forms of animal life in the world. Familiar domestic animals and wild animals, as well as some less well-known species are featured as their parent's version of child care are showcased with the soft and charming illustrations of artist Stephanie F. Coleman. It's a big, wide, and wonderful world of parenting out there, and this nonfiction book, with its ample contrasts of care is a fine source for nature study for young naturalists. With its ample glossary and world map of animal homes, this one is good for one-to-one sharing or early-grade animal science study. Says School Library Journal, "A pleasing choice for young nonfiction enthusiasts that belongs on most elementary shelves."

Scary Skeletons? Book of Bones: 10 Record-Breaking Bones by Gabrielle Balkan

In the spooky season, skeletons are in style, giving parents and teachers an occasion to slip in some sneaky science.

And Gabrielle Balkan's Book of Bones: 10 Record-Breaking Animals (Phaidon Books, 2017) is many things, one of which is an anatomy lesson on how animal skeletons display the maxim that "form follows function." Balkan makes good use of this chance to explain how giraffes' long necks help them reach high in the trees for a tender, nutritious diet, how snakes' many spinal vertebrae help them slither silently and swiftly, and how a spiky spine makes the regal horned lizard a bad choice for a quick bite to eat.

And the author sweetens the science lesson with her "Guess Who" game format which teases the young reader into turning each page.

Who has the biggest bones?

(The Blue Whale)

Balkan has a little fun with some tricky page turns, too.

Who has the fewest bones?

(A hammerhead shark?)

What? The hammerhead looks like it ought to have the usual, extra-bony fish skeleton, but animal anatomists know that sharks mostly have cartilaginous skeletons rather than bony ones. And there is more tricky and tasty trivia here--e.g., that the smallest bones in the world are the three middle-ear bones, the malleus, incus, and stapes) of the pinky-nail sized Etruscan shrew! Who knew?

Artist Sam Brewster is on the team, offering stunning white illustrations of the ten record- breaking skeletons, done in embossed, touch-and-feel fashion and set brilliantly against black pages which make the pictures pop. In more good design, the text is done in bright white to carry through with the high-contrast format. Author Gabrielle Balkan also adds a useful glossary to the backmatter to round out this book's scientific chops, making it a good choice for skeleton season that will be sought out even when the treats are all eaten. "A stylish introduction to how specialized and different bones can be," Publishers Weekly points out. "A rib-tickling gallery." quips Kirkus Review.

Stats! Animals by the Numbers: A Book of Animal Infographics by Steve Jenkins

Numbers help us understand our world.

When it comes to animals, numbers are especially important. How big is a whale? How loud is a lion's roar? It would be difficult to answer these questions--even to ask them--without numbers.

In this book, facts and figures abut animals are presented visually as graphs, symbols, and illustrations. Infographics give us another way of looking at animals.

Author-artist Steve Jenkins is rightly famous for his exquisite illustrations of the world of animals fashioned elegantly with layered paper collage and a fine eye for detail. But no child can look at those pictures without asking questions. How big is it? How long does it live? How many of them live in the world?

The answers to these questions involve numbers. but delivering the answers about many animals would involve endless words, sentences, and pages--mind-numbing numbers of them!

In his newest book, Animals by the Numbers: A Book of Infographics (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), Steve Jenkins turns to infographics, a symbolic way to represent masses of numbers graphically, making them easy to compare and understand.

How loud is a lion's roar? In a typical two-page spread, Jenkins first defines the decibel, the unit of measure for sounds, in an infographic full of surprising comparisons: an insect called a water boatman can be as loud as a lawn mower, a bush cricket and that rhetorical lion can match a chainsaw's 110 decibels, and a little creature called a bulldog bat, the noise champ of land animals, can equal a jet plane's takeoff roar at 140 decibels. Deep under the sea, though, the pistol shrimp is the diva of decibels, with a prey-stunning blast of 200 decibels.

There are plenty of Gees! and Wows! and not a few Yikes! among Jenkin's variety of infographic symbols--bar graphs, line graphs, symbols, flow charts, and the rest--including one using little clothespin figure symbols that show the number of human deaths caused by various animals, some of which prompt all three exclamations: sharks cause only an average of 10 deaths per year; crocodiles cause 1,600, (a mere pittance compared to, yes, the dog at 55,000 deaths per year.) But the champion man killer, the mosquito, gets most of a whole double-page spread for those rows and rows of little doomed figures--a million lives per year.

The author's variety of infographic types is amazing in their variety, but more so in their ease of almost instant understanding and ability to portray a lot of information in a small space. A graphic artist like Jenkins is himself a rare beast indeed, in the beauty of his classy artistic sensibility, his passion for nature science, and his distinctive style of representing numerical concepts with flair and polished panache.

Steve Jenkins' Animals by the Numbers: A Book of Infographics is yet another necessary purchase for all public and school libraries, a book than even math teachers may want to own for their own bookshelves.

Dendrology by Another Name Would Seem as Green: Treecology by Monica Russo

"Trees can be seen almost everywhere we live. Even if you have never seen a forest or taken a woodland walk, you might have enjoyed the cool shade of a tree on a hot day or seen the beauty of a tree in flower. Trees give us visual relief from the city environment. Trees are a vital part of a healthy forest ecology."

Trees are such an integral part of most people's lives that we take them for granted as part of our mental landscapes. We can't see the trees for the forest, so to speak.

But when you look at the impact of trees in absolutely every aspect of human life, you see how essential they are for life on this planet. They actually give us everything they have--the habitat for untold species we depend upon, fuel and building materials, protection against the elements, the nurturing source of streams and rivers, and the life-giving oxygen in the very air we breathe.

It's no wonder that environmental science education often begins and ends with trees and the effect of their presence or absence on human ecology. Monica Russo's new Treecology: 30 Activities and Observations for Exploring the World of Trees and Forests (Young Naturalists) (Chicago Review Press, 2016) offers both an easy educational read for older middle readers and a source book for educators of all kinds, from Scout and camp leaders to classroom teachers. Russo's eight chapters--What Is a Tree? Tree Families, From the Ground Up, Woodland Wildlife, It's Dead...No, It's Alive! It's Nuts! Food for Animals, Out and About, Tree Treks, and People and Trees--and Forest Conservation--begin with the essential definitions and lead the student through widening circles of interaction with the meaning of trees to life on earth and how they themselves fit into that picture, sometimes even simply by planting and tending a tree.

Russo has a hands-on approach to nature science, getting kids down digging in the forest litter and plucking leaves from the branches, counting tree rings, and getting their hands dirty investigating the unseen forms of life that exist even in dead trees and expanding their world view from the canopy of rain forests and the effect forests have on  life even in earth's deserts. Plenty of projects and activities dot each chapter, from a simple leaf rubbing or a collection types of leaves right down to a census of the life forms that exist in a woodland, from the backyard grove to local arboretums to national parks. Multiple color photos fill the pages, illustrating what is discussed in each section.

Russo includes a glossary that introduces cool terms such petiole and fascicle, a table of common and scientific names, a collection of organizations which offer varied materials, a teacher's guide, bibliography, and index. Just in time for those "signs of fall" nature walks, this is an essential for public and school libraries, and a handy and inexpensive resource for any home or classroom bookshelf.

“A labor of love reflecting years of experience in the field as well as in writing for young readers," says Kirkus Reviews.

Winter Doesn't Last Forever! Winter Bees & Other Poems of the Cold by Joyce Sidman

Nature has taught all of its creatures how to cope with the coming of winter. The ectotherms, cold-blooded reptiles like the garter snake, are among the first to sense the earth's turning:

BROTHER, SISTER, FLICK YOUR TONGUE
AND TASTE THE FLICKS OF AUTUMN SUN.
BEFORE YOUR COILS GROW STIFF AND DULL,
YOUR HEARTBEAT SLOWS TO WINTER'S LULL,

SEEK THE SINK OF SHELTERED STONES
THAT SAFELY CRADLE SLEEPING BONES.


As winter comes, even the wings of swans know what to do:

DUSK FELL
THAT NIGHT WE DREAMED THE JOURNEY:
WE DREAMED OURSELVES SO FAR ALOFT
THAT THE EARTH CURVED BENEATH US.

Snakes hibernate together, huddled in coiled communities of hundreds or thousands underground, and birds fly to comforting climes. Moose switch to a diet of twigs and shoots, and bees squeeze together in a "sizzling ball ... like a golden sun." Beavers winter in wigwams of sticks and mud, sending a youngster forth for takeout from the cached twigs and branches stored nearby, and wolves and ravens travel together, the birds sounding an alert that prey is near, even pecking at the wolves' tails to rouse them, and the wolves doing the work of making the kill for both of them.

Newbery-winning poet Joyce Sidman's latest, Winter Bees & Other Poems of the Cold (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), turns her considerable poetic skills to colder climes and times. Foxes, voles, chickadees, even snow fleas, all have their ways of wintering and readying themselves to spring into spring. Sidman's specialty is lyrical language, set in varied verse forms, that can enchant even the most reluctant poetry reader with its cleverness, beauty, and insight into the natural world. Rick Allen's appealing artwork, lovely double-page spreads in wintry palette, set off Sidman's rhymes and add movement and accurate portrayal of the animals and plants, even the stinky skunk cabbage, first in spring to pierce the snow cover, in its wintry world. Informational passages on each spread add additional knowledge to Sidman's poetic text, and an appended glossary provides definitions of vocabulary used in the text, all making this slim volume the best poetry of the year.

As Sidman's chicadees sing...

QUICK AND BOLD AND BRAVE AND CLEVER,
WE PREEN AND FLUFF EACH DOWNY FEATHER.
SING FEE-BEE--LAUGH AT THE WEATHER--
FOR WINTER DOESN'T LAST FOREVER!

Hear Life Murmur or See It Glisten! Some Bugs by Angela DiTerlizzi

SOME BUGS BUILD

SOME BUGS MAKE

SOME BUGS HUNT

AND SOME BUGS TAKE.

It's a jungle out there!

Paper wasps build light, strong, homey hives. Some spiders make webs, and jumping spiders hunt. And columns of ants take whatever they want back home with them.

Grasshoppers glide, and leaf hoppers hide. Spiders bite, and Hercules bugs fight, locking horns in battle. Caterpillars crawl, while a sow bug rolls into a ball.

And just where can all this action be found?

..KNEEL DOWN CLOSE.

LOOK VERY HARD,

AND FIND SOME BUGS

IN YOUR BACKYARD.

How to identify all these busy bugs? Angela di Terlizzi's Some Bugs (Beach Lane Books, 2014) offers all of these creepy, crawly, flitting critters, along with an appendix, What's That Bug? with thumbnail drawings and names and information about her cast of characters--thrips, nymphs, earwigs and all. But DiTerlizzi's jolly verses almost take a back seat to the absolutely cutest bugs in non-fiction picture book land, created by artist Brendan Wenzel in fabulous design and colors that are fascinating to follow from page to page. Superstar illustrator-author Eric Carle calls this one "a delightful combination of pictures and words," and Publishers Weekly stars it and says, "Readers will feel transported to a summer day, when the air is musical and life is literally buzzing."

The Eyes Have It: Eye to Eye: How Animals See the World by Steve Jenkins

Most animals rely on their vision, more than any other sense, to find out what is going on around them. For these creatures, the eyes are the most important link to the world.

In the animal kingdom the eyes really do have it, for finding food, avoiding being another animal's food, communicating and reproducing, and, as any human mother knows, keeping their offspring safe while they are growing up.

But the means of vision vary, from the tiny eyespot, which only perceives light, to the basketball-sized eyeball of the colossal squid, from simple sensor cells shared by worms and sponges to the super-sharp camera eye of raptors such as the Eurasian buzzard, who can spot a rabbit from two miles away.

The eye is one of the most specialized of all organs. Some animals, such as cats and deer, have built in reflectors called tapetum which reflect external light back outward to assist nocturnal hunting and foraging. Others, such as the mantis shrimp have light and color perception that Picasso would have envied, to help them survive in among their colorful coral reefs. Atlantic scallops have dozens of bright blue eyes arranged along their shells. Some animals, such as ghost crabs and snails are equipped for a 360-degree view, while the panther chameleon can swivel its two eyes independently of each other with true double vision.  Some animal eyes, such as those of frogs,  only see motion, while others can "see" ultraviolet and infrared" waves that humans cannot. Predators like wolves and humans can take in only one view, but with incredible depth perception made possible by their binocular vision abilities which enable most of what we humans do--driving, throwing, reading--all those things that require great focus that places objects accurately in space.

Illustrated lushly with deftly painted collages, Steve Jenkins' Eye to Eye: How Animals See The World (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), shows and tells the reader about the variety and wonders of vision. As is his wont, Jenkins specializes in up-close views of his subject, giving us clear views of the four eyes of jumping spider, the compound eyes of the dragonfly, or the zipper eyes of the leopard gecko. His highly readable and succinct text slips in much information while providing plenty of amazing animal facts to entice middle readers to look deeper into the subject.  For further research, the author also offers an excellent appendix with diagrams of the five types of eyes--eyespot, eyecup, pinhole, primitive lens, and camera eye--thumbnail illustrations and descriptions of  his intriguing animals and their eyes, as well as a useful bibliography and glossary.

Eye-catching and eye-opening eye candy, Steve Jenkins' tribute to the science and art of vision gives young animal lovers a close look at the nature of seeing and the seeing of nature. Recommended for curious browsers and as a middle reader research report resource, this one should have a place in classroom, school, and public libraries.

Plenty of Patterns: Sorting Through Spring by Lizann Flatt

COULD FLOWERS ONLY GROW

IN SET PATTERNS, ROW BY ROW?

Which rows make an ABA, ABA pattern?

What other patterns do you see?

Patterns do occur in nature, but most of the patterns in LizAnn Flatt's new Sorting Through Spring (Math in Nature) (Owlkids Books, 2013) are not among those naturally occurring regularities--they appear as devised teaching opportunities in the bright and stylized cut-paper collage illustrations of artist Ashley Barron.

With the exception of the spring ritual of the male prairie hen--woo-woo flap, stampity stomp-stomp!--most of the double-page spreads simply use spring cycles to teach the concept of sorting, a math skill that involves recognizing similarities and differences and spotting repetitions, or patterns, of like and unlike. Some concepts may require previous learning, such as what an ABA pattern is.

Examples range from the simple--recognizing the color pattern in piles of shed yellow or white caribou antlers--to the advanced, calculating the ratio between the number of eggs laid by robins as opposed to hummingbirds (robins lay four; hummingbirds lay two). Many of the tasks involve skills in between, such as greater than or less than or reading a bar graph about where mosquitoes lay eggs and interpreting where in the illustrations the mosquitoes will leave their eggs. Some pattern pages are open-ended, asking what other ways the items could be grouped, by color or shape or pattern.

One double-page spread deals with reasoning as well as probability, or at least thinking beyond the counting box, asking whether a father fox is most likely to bring home a dinner of voles, squirrels, or rabbits, a query which lends itself to considerations beyond which one of the three animals are most plentiful on the page. (For example, squirrels on a tree trunk are unlikely catches for a ground-based predator, no matter how many there are!)

An appendix, "Nature Notes," offers short summaries of the spring habits and behaviors of the featured animals, but provide few clues to the mathematical queries in the text. The second in the Math in Nature series, Sorting Through Spring (Math in Nature), published in Canada, features some animals (caribou, lake smelt) which will not be familiar to students in the more southern regions of North America, but whether the pictured animal is called a caribou, a reindeer, or just a deer, a smelt or just a fish is not material to the mathematical concept presented. Picture books which deal with mathematical concepts such as probability, ratio, and complex patterns are rare, and the charming illustrations of animals in spring make this book an attractive seasonal choice for young readers. The small size of this book and the detail of the patterns make this one best for adult-and-child use, although some older puzzle-preferring readers may choose to pour over the pictures by themselves.

My review of the first book in this series, Counting on Fall (Math in Nature) can be seen here.

Browsing the Biosphere: The Natural World: the World in Infographics by Jon Richards

WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF INFOGRAPHICS

Using icons, graphics, and pictograms, infographics visualize data and information in a whole new way!

Owlkids Books launches its new nonfiction series, The World in Infographics, with its just-published The Natural World (The World in Infographics) (Owlkids Books, 2013) in a format that maximizes interest for the elementary school reader. The editors and author Jon Richards start off with a sure-fire subject for its target readers--middle elementary students--the world of nature, in a design that will stir  inquisitiveness about the wonders of animals and plants.

Richards' design covers one facet of the biosphere in each double-page spread in this brief book, beginning with The Order of Natural Things, breaking down the kingdoms of plants and animals into their subordinate scientific hierarchies by phyla, class, order, family, genus, and species, using the "descent" of the familiar wolf as its final species. The following eleven topics include Microscopic World, Genes and Cell Division, Growing Up, Food Webs, Evolution, Fast and Slow (speeds of animals), Big and Small (sizes of plants and animals), Record Breakers, Animal Countdown (timeline of appearance of plants and animals), and Under Threat (endangered species), as well a a very helpful glossary and index.

Clearly this book is intended as an introductory browsing book for young readers interested in the natural world: each two-page subject could easily be a book in its own right, and Richards' selectivity of what facts to include under each topic is clearly intended only to pique interest and provide an framework for further study.

While the use of graphics, icons, charts, graphs, and pictograms is not new to nonfiction, author Richards and illustrator Ed Simkins make good use of this design technique, for example, in the section on maturation, the short-lived ant is shown on a continuous length-of-life line which ends for animals with the Galapagos tortoise (at 190 years) and for plants with black coral which have endured for at least 4,265 years. Food Webs shows how phytoplankton begin the process ending with tertiary consumers such as the polar bear and arctic whales and birds. Big and Small features icons representing the tallest animal (giraffe), down through the largest, the blue whale, through elephants, horses and camels, to humans. A separate comparison shows that a giant sequoia is as tall as 29 stacked elephants, and a fact book points out that the largest living organism is actually a fungus in Oregon covering 3.4 square miles. The chapter on threatened animals shows eye-catching icons side by side representing the relative number of, for example, elephants in Chad declining from 400,000 to 10,000 between 1970 and 2006.

Publishers Weekly gives The Natural World (The World in Infographics) a starred review for its inviting layout and well-chosen examples encouraging student interest in the natural sciences, saying "Richards and Simkins use bright digital graphs, charts, pictograms, and other high-impact images to explore topics related to life on Earth in this smart kickoff to a series."

FLIPPA-FLAP, SNIPPA-SNAP! Go, JoJo, Go by Tessa Bickford and Jennifer Castles

"IF YOU KEEP SWIMMING, JOJO, YOU'LL REACH THE WHITE SNOW LANDS," SAID DADDOO.

"THE ICEBERGS ARE QUITE A SIGHT TO SEE."

Although the little Gentoo penguin JoJo loves her "beautiful beach" on Macquarrie Island and life with Daddoo, Mammoo, and lazy brother Ballyhoo, like all youngsters she can't wait to learn how to do it all--swimming alone in the ocean and traveling to the fabled land of ice and snow to the south.

But first she has much to learn.  From the elephant seal Bubbah, a big, soft blob on land and fast and graceful in the water, she learns the joy of swimming.  JoJo watches with envy as he slides into the sea to catch his fishy dinner. Meanwhile, she has to dodge the hungry skua birds, with their sharp, snapping beaks and worry about a sudden attack from a huge orca, beaching itself suddenly to snap up baby penguins.

Still, JoJo had fun with the other chicks and soon grows so big that she can laugh at the skuas and swim from rock to rock in the tidal pools, dreaming of how she will bite that orca on his nose if he dares to swim up.

Then suddenly she feel herself changing.

ONE DAY MY FUZZY BABY-COAT STARTS TO COME OFF AND THERE ARE SMOOTH, SHINY FEATHERS UNDERNEATH.

Now Jojo can slip through the water as gracefully as Bubbah, and she builds her endurance every day until she is ready for her first solo swim out beyond the seaweed forest, to the blue sea where she meets a scary but gentle Minke whale and catches her first ocean fish.

AND ONE DAY I'LL GO AS FAR AS THE WHITE SNOW LANDS. 

I'VE HEARD THE ICEBERGS ARE QUITE A SIGHT TO SEE.

Tessa Bickford's and Jennifer Castles' Go Jojo Go! (Allen & Unwin, 2012) is an easy-going photobio essay which is an excellent introduction to the study of penguins in general and the Gentoo in particular. Bickford alternates her full-bleed photo pages with dialogue pages as she describes the development of a young penguin, the sights and sounds around her, the care of her parents, and the steps toward becoming one of those intrepid penguins to make the "big swim" from their nursery on Macquarrie Island all the way to their base camp in Antarctica. JoJo is an observant narrator, and her juvenile adventures as she grows makes a delightful guide to the study of this fascinating aquatic bird.

Sometimes I Wonder...: You Are Stardust by Elin Kelsey

Every tiny atom in your body
came from a star that exploded
long before you were born.

Salt still flows
through your veins, your sweat, and your tears.

The sea within you is as salty as the ocean.

The biblical book of Genesis, the poet Omar Khayam, and cosmologist Carl Sagan agree: we are such stuff as stars are made of: the very atoms that make up our bodies are those of the stars, and the sea within us is identical to the seas that support life on our world, giving moisture to the clouds in a constant water cycle that has supported life on earth since it began. Part of nature, we share many commonalities with our world.

Inside your brain, electricity
stronger than lightning
powers your every thought.

Like the earth, we constantly recycle our elements. Children grow at night and grow their fastest during the growing season just as the plants do. We shed hair in the autumn just as the trees drop leaves, growing new short hair to provide a dense undercoat for winter as wild mammals do. Just like all the earth our bodies change and recycle themselves, replacing our skin over 100 times in childhood.

... you grow entirely new skeletons throughout your life.

And, as American poet Walt Whitman long ago said, "I contain multitudes."

From your head to your toes,
inside and out, billions of teeny
microorganisms live on planet YOU.

And like other living things, we can grow relationships, friends and family, with other people and with the animals around us to sustain ourselves.

Bats and whales get their friends to babysit.

Elin Kelsey’s You Are Stardust (Owl Kids Press, 2012) uses plain but evocative language to make its point, that we are all part of everything around us. There is a lot to wonder about for a child, and Kelsey’s simple but striking narrative is both poetry and science lesson, answering questions and raising many more for young reader to wonder about --the stuff of science and philosophy that all humans ponder, the mystery of it all. This little book can be the first to open up such wide thoughts.

Kirkus Reviews raves, "This is a work that demands to be read and reread, studied and examined, and thoroughly digested. It is perfect for sparking adult and child conversations about our place in the universe. A remarkable achievement.