A KID’S GUIDE TO BACKYARD BIRDS

A gallery of 40 common U.S. birds, with painted portraits and brief nature notes.

Stretching the confines of a “backyard” to include great blue herons and turkey vultures, Berkowitz selects birds that beginners should find relatively easy to identify, and LaRue helps out by emphasizing distinctive markings and colors in her simplified renderings. For true tyros, the author opens with instructions for making an all-edible feeder out of an apple, seeds, peanut butter, and twine but then goes on to assemble a tool kit (binoculars, camera, bug spray, proper footwear, a pen and notebook) for more ambitious bird-watchers and slips in a blank page to serve as a sighting log. Attempts to reproduce each bird’s call run along the lines of the Carolina wren’s “Teakettle!” and like fancies (or, in the cases of both the European starling and the mockingbird, a side-stepping “I imitate!”), but each entry does include, along with an image of a male individual, usually perched on a twig, a range map and pictures of an egg and of seeds, bugs, garbage, or other typical foods. “Birds are everywhere,” the author encouragingly promises and, except perhaps for the turkey vulture (which “swoop[s] in when an animal has died to eat the remains”), fun to seek out and study.

Hits the sweet spot between primary introductions and full-length field guides.