WHEN WINTER COMES

How do animals stay alive through the winter? After posing the question, Freedman shows us a range of answers: saving food, as squirrels do with nuts; hibernating, as woodchucks and other animals do; hunting other animals or digging for seeds and roots; and migrating, as some birds do. As Freedman pans past the various animals, he also notes the features that help them stay warm or hide from enemies in winter, and he points to interesting examples beyond the standard squirrel-nut level. For example, he shows a beaver amassing a pile of tree branches, then nibbling at the bark "as though it were eating corn on the cob" throughout the winter. With pleasant soft-pencil drawings of the different animals in snowy settings, an agreeable early nature book.