I’m the author of more than 25 award-winning books for children, including Mama Built a Little Nest, illustrated by Steve Jenkins, and I Love Birds! 52 Ways to Wonder, Wander and Explore Birds with Kids, illustrated by Alexander Vidal. When not writing, I help rehabilitate injured and orphaned songbirds, I study bird behavior, and I further my knowledge about birds through books and scholarly journals. Birds offer a constant source of discovery and wonder. I hope the books I’ve recommended offer a source of discovery and wonder for your young readers, too!
Not only is this book stunning – sculpted paper illustrations that appear 3D – it offers a flock-full of information about birds and the many types of beaks one may find on them. A beak isn’t just a beak, after all. With over 10,000 bird species in the world, it’s not surprising to learn that bird beaks come in many shapes and sizes, each with a specific purpose to a bird’s habitat necessary for survival in this big, wide world. Although geared for young readers, this book will inspire readers of all ages to take notice of bird beaks. Anytime we can encourage young readers to engage with nature and the world around them, that’s a good thing, don’t you think?
1
author picked
Beaks!
as one of their favorite books, and they share
why you should read it.
This book is for kids age
4,
5,
6, and
7.
What is this book about?
Young naturalists explore a variety of birds, their habitats, and how their beaks help them build, eat, and survive. From the twisted beak of a crossbill to the color changing bill of a seagull, readers will learn fun facts about how beaks are designed and used as tools by birds of all shapes and sizes. Bright, bold cut-paper illustrations create amazingly realistic tableaus of birds in their natural environments with their beaks in action. Back matter includes a comprehensive quiz, a bibliography, and a list of related websites.
Writing is part of living for me, and I see that same spirit in Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s prose, which was created during her solitary time in a beach cottage on Captiva Island on Florida’s Gulf Coast.
The first week is solitude and collapse, emptying out of the stress and thoughts of the city.
Then, in the second week, she slowly returns to life and lies in wait. One must not rush or dig for inspiration. The sea, she says, will bring it.
This book is a simple meditation on being in touch with a place and its gifts. She writes only about being at the sea, of moon shells and whelks, of an oyster bed and an Argonauta. They are metaphors and lead into discussions of the role of women. It is magical. And 50 years since she first wrote it, Lindbergh’s words are still fresh and musical. They still…
'Quietly powerful and a great help. Glorious' Emma Thompson
'Women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves.'
Holidaying by the sea, and taking inspiration from the shells she finds on the seashore, Anne Morrow Lindbergh meditates on youth and age, love and marriage, peace, solitude and contentment. First published in 1955 and an instant bestseller, Gift from the Sea's insights - into aspects of the modern world that threaten to overwhelm us, the complications of technology, the ever multiplying commitments that take us from our families - are as relevant today as they ever were,…
Though I live in the foothills of the Ozarks, I’m an Anglophile at heart, loving all things Jane Eyre and Jane Austen. I spent much of my angsty adolescence tucked away in Regency and Victorian England with my nose stuck in a book. As a result, I now jump at every chance I get to skip across the pond and roam the English countryside, listening hard to hear all the voices from the past—which is why my stories are always tied to British history. So whether you love ballrooms or shadowy tales set in gothic manors, here’s a great list for you.
Every chance I get to skip across the pond I take in a heartbeat, and one of my very favorite places to visit is the coast of Cornwall. You don’t have to spend a ton of money on airfare, though, to do the same. The descriptions in this book are positively scrumptious. You’ll feel as if your toes are in the sand with seagulls circling overhead. Plus there’s a fantastic mystery involved. Win. Win.
Set adrift on the tides of fate by the deaths of her parents and left wanting answers, Laura Callaway now lives with her uncle and his disapproving wife in North Cornwall. There she feels like a castaway, always viewed as an outsider even as she yearns to belong.
While wreckers search for valuables along the windswept Cornwall coast--known for its many shipwrecks but few survivors--Laura searches for clues to the lives lost so she can write letters to next of kin and return keepsakes to rightful owners. When a man is washed ashore after a wreck, Laura acts quickly to…
My first memory of storytelling was as a kid reading Jules Verne’s, The Mysterious Island in the basement of my house in The Bronx where I grew up. It transported me to a world of magic and mystery. The effect of that experience wouldn’t seriously take hold for decades when I realized the acting career I’d pursued for twenty years wasn’t where I was meant to be. Fascinated with mysteries and metaphysics and studying the world of past lives and reincarnation led me to incorporate this vast realm into what I write. The Occurrence, my first novel, took these ideas and thread them through a story of politics and spirituality.
I’ve always felt the story of my book was more parable than anything else. And Steinbeck’s The Pearl is one of the best.
“Be careful what you wish for” is a powerful theme, and The Pearl answers it with a moral wallop in less than a hundred pages. This is a constant reminder that not only is less more, but in the hands of a master, a parable can be a complete, compelling, and life-changing experience. Something I aspire to every day.
"There it lay, the great pearl, perfect as the moon."
Like his father and grandfather before him, Kino is a poor diver, gathering pearls from the gulf beds that once brought great wealth to the Kings of Spain and now provide Kino, Juana, and their infant son with meager subsistence. Then, on a day like any other, Kino emerges from the sea with a pearl as large as a sea gull's egg, as "perfect as the moon." With the pearl comes hope, the promise of comfort and of security....
A story of classic simplicity, based on a Mexican folk tale,…
I write about those people (geologists, art historians, historians, and curators), places (museums, universities, and societies), and things (fossils, paintings, and historical artifacts) that shape our understanding of the world. I am not so much interested in the history of ideas as in the very nature of art, geology, history, and the museum. And like my recommended authors, the approach I take to my subjects is, I hope, always rather novel. In The Great Fossil Enigma, for example, I felt that the tiny, suggestive, but ultimately ambiguous, nature of the fossils permitted me to see into the scientific mind. This tends to be where extinct animals live after their demise.
In 2000, Errol Fuller published an entirely new, lavishly illustrated, edition of his 1987 book,Extinct Birds. In the years since it was first publishedmore birds had been lost while others he had described as extinct had subsequently been rediscovered. Extinct Birdsdocuments 85 species that have disappeared since 1600, including the Eskimo Curlew and Choiseul Crested Pigeon, as well as the more famous Passenger Pigeon, Great Auk, and Dodo. All are now dead and gone (probably!). A book of fascinating, if ultimately sad, tales, and beautiful pictures, it should encourage us to care about those species now on the edge of extinction like the Kakapo, the Kiwi, and the massively poached African Grey Parrot.
Thirteen years ago I adopted a homeless dog from Puerto Rico. I also met his rescuers, and they told me the story of this little yellow dog who lived by the food trucks on the road between San Juan and El Yunque National Forest. He had been hit by a car once, maybe twice. His leg was broken, and he was close to death. But they scooped him up, took him to the vet for surgery, nursed him to health, and sent him north. I named him Winston, and now I read every dog book with him in mind – the way he trusts me, believes in me, understands me, and understands everything I say. How did we get so lucky to have dogs?
I watch these oil rigs blow up, I bear witness to birds smothered by oil slicks, and I am paralyzed with despair. But Luis Sepulveda finds hope, and he finds it with two animals who, in my back yard, would be natural enemies: a cat and a seagull. He finds, not only hope, but also reasons to break all unwritten rules. Because life is more precious than money, and hope is stronger than despair. I love the animals in this book. I love them with my whole heart. They’re not super smart or super courageous or super anything. They’re two animals, on a porch in a situation that needs to be solved. And if they can do the impossible, then damnit, I can at least try.
Published in 20 countries, sold over 1 million copies, and the subject of a feature film, THE STORY OF A SEAGULL AND THE CAT WHO TAUGHT HER TO FLY has finally come to the U.S.!
It's migration time and as a mother gull dives into the water to catch a herring she's caught in an oil slick! Thinking of the egg she is about to lay she manages to extract herself and fly to the nearest port. Exhausted, she lands on a balcony where Zorba the cat is sunning himself. Zorba wants to get help, but the gull knows it's…
The collection Little Musings, available on Amazon, covers several decades of Joy's work as poet and painter. It touches on many aspects of her life, including the loss of her mother, in Do Not Mourn Her and Loss - Double Rainbow. Her childhood was spent in Plymouth, and in A Plymouth Girl Reflects, she recalls the aftermath of the air raids. Being in close proximity to Cornwall, that area also a major theme here, especially in Newquay, Cornwall, and On Air, By Melancholy. Four of the poems, "Absent Friends," "Isle of Thanet," "At Jim's Cafe," and "Captain Ahab of Thanet" are focused on the Thanet area of East Kent, where Joy now lives.
At this time there was extensive maritime traffic between Cornwall and the West Indies. The Lip also has an affinity with my own experience, which included going on a Transatlantic Voyage, described in my own book, and a collection of poems I wrote on board.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WRITERS' GUILD BEST FIRST NOVEL AWARD | SHORTLISTED FOR THE HOLYER AN GOF LITERARY FICTION AWARD | LONGLISTED FOR THE AUTHORS' CLUB BEST FIRST NOVEL AWARD
'This unsparing debut novel portrays the unromantic side of Cornwall few visitors see and which so many novelists choose to overlook. Charlie Carroll inhabits his damaged heroine completely' Patrick Gale 'A moving and affecting novel about life on the edge, with a very special flavour of wild and rugged Cornwall.' Emma Stonex, author of THE LAMPLIGHTERS
Away from the hotels and holiday lets, there is an unseen side of Cornwall, where…
I’m a teacher, sailor, kayaker, and environmental-vegan animal lover. I live by the sea among marine wildlife. I grew up sailing, then sailed the Pacific on the tiny wooden boat that was my first marital home. We had no engine, no modern technology. Like the sea beings, we had a wing in the wind and a fin in the sea so we lived in their world, on their terms. Alone, helming under the stars, I dreamed of dolphin culture and mentally made lists of possible dolphin vocations. This helped me create fiction from the dolphin viewpoint. Input from scientists brought authenticity to my marine environmental fantasies and messages.
This book is about taking the physical path to spiritual freedom, without the need for any religion. It inspired me to cross oceans under sail, to complete ultra-distance multi-disciplinary sports events, and to build my own faith in the divineness of the natural world. Would you believe it helped me win bike races?
And I love that it does all this through the lens of a beautiful feathered sea being. This non-human viewpoint released the author from the prison of human arrogance. Glorious. And it inspired some wonderful music.
This classic work is now available for the first time in paperback. Since 1951, when the last of the Witchcraft Acts was repealed, many books have been written about the reappearance of witchcraft and the development of a pagan theology. Churchmen have denounced it. Sociologists have wondered at it. Journalists have penned sensational stories about it. But until the publication of this book, no one had told the real story of it from the inside as frankly as it is told here.
Doreen Valiente, one of witchcraft's most widely known figures, was a close friend of the late Gerald Gardner,…
I am a novelist and an academic. My own writing often evokes both the Gothic and the supernatural, and I enjoy the pleasures of plot: mystery, intrigue, and suspense. The popular literature of a particular culture will often tell you more about what that culture fears than the complex high art written at the same time. But where the project becomes really interesting is the moment when a writer exploits the literature of terror to investigate the human psyche and the dark side of the mind. All these tales are also award-winning films. In every case the book is more frightening.
The Birdsis a tale of invasion. The rural West country setting appears safe, predictable. But Nat, an ordinary farm labourer, notices at once when the birds begin to mingle "in strange partnership." The description of the mass of gulls, riding the waves, waiting for the tide to turn, is unforgettable, superb. The birds are united against a single enemy, and they have a plan. They don’t care how many of their numbers die as long as they annihilate humanity.
I love apocalypse tales and this is one of the greatest stories about what happens when nature turns against us.
'How long he fought with them in the darkness he could not tell, but at last the beating of the wings about him lessened and then withdrew . . . '
A classic of alienation and horror, 'The Birds' was immortalised by Hitchcock in his celebrated film. The five other chilling stories in this collection echo a sense of dislocation and mock man's sense of dominance over the natural world.
The mountain paradise of 'Monte Verita' promises immortality, but at a terrible price; a neglected wife haunts her husband in the form of an…
As a picture book creator, I am always seeking to use as few words as possible – for me, the best picture books are those where the images do most of the storytelling. Wordless books take things a step further and totally engage the child in interpreting the story - the child becomes the story's voice. Wordless books have a special place in my heart and I’m always on the lookout for new silent treasures as they emerge into the wonderful world of picture books. I want everyone to experience the special magic of ‘reading’ wordless books.
A gorgeous picture book that captures the joys and excitement of being a child at the sea, playing chicken with the incoming waves. The little girl and a gaggle of gulls get braver and braver, until… SPLASH!
Suzy Lee’s lines are so fluid and expressive, her use of a limited palette works brilliantly, and there’s a clever use of the gutter (middle of the book) to build tension. Dare you not to smile and feel joy.
In this evocative wordless book, internationally acclaimed artist Suzy Lee tells the story of a little girl's day at the beach. Stunning in their simplicity, Lee's illustrations, in just two shades of watercolour, create a vibrant story full of joy and laughter.New York Times Best Illustrated Children's Book 2008
