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The Little Book of Garden Bird Song by Andrea Pinnington and Caz Buckingham (view source)
Revision as of 13:07, 4 February 2015
, 13:07, 4 February 2015no edit summary
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Take a well-put-together board book (don't worry about it being a board book - no one is going to suggest that they're a bit too old for that), add exquisite pictures of a dozen birds - one on each double-page spread - and then fill in the details. You'll need the name of the bird in English and Latin and a description of the bird in words which a child can understand but which won't patronise an adult. Then you'll need details of where the bird is found, what it eats, where it nests, how many eggs it lays, how the male and female adults differ and their size. Then you need a 'Did you know?' fact and this needs to be something which will interest children, but which adults might not know either. Does it sound simple? Well it isn't, but 'The Little Book of Garden Bird Song' does it perfectly. And there's a bonus, but I'll tell you about that in a moment.
The pictures are beautiful - they bring the birds to life and you can really see the details, from how the feathers lie and the shape of the beak through to how the claws grip a branch. There's a wide selection of birds too - greenfinch, dunnock, song thrush, great tit, black cap, blue tit, blackbird, goldfinch, carrion crow, chaffinch, robin and my particular favourite - the wren. It's a careful selection - in most parts of the country you're likely to encounter some if not all of the birds.