WONDER WINGS

Soaring rhymes celebrate wings of many sorts as an equally diverse cast of bright-eyed young children look on.

“Small wings, big wings, near and far. / Can you guess whose wings these are?” Offering tantalizing hints about each example until a page turn reveals the answer, Hirsch writes of honeybees and katydids, hummingbirds and mallards—but also expands her topic well beyond bugs and birds to encompass winged things from maple seeds to pterosaurs and jet planes. As she explains in a substantial afterword, each uses wings in distinctive ways. Penguin chicks don’t fly, for instance, but steer with their flippers as they toboggan down ice slopes on their bellies, and butterflies flap in a figure-eight pattern, clapping their wings to create a propulsive puff of air. Individual readers and listening audiences alike will come away understanding the structural differences between the wings of bats and birds, not to mention how lift can be created by both wing curvature and by the “tiny tornado” that forms over the flat surface of a maple “whirlybird.” Han mixes brightly hued close-ups of flora and fauna with views of small children immersed in peaceful natural settings, being strapped into their seats, or, in one fetching scene, donning wings themselves to flit cheerily about.

A nicely balanced combination of guessing game and scientific facts.