Nesting Grounds

In Nesting Grounds, Sarah Jane Conklin combines her talents as a painter and a poet to introduce young Canadians to 10 birds (females only) and their nests and eggs. The birds are: sparrow, hummingbird, robin, cardinal, plover, goldfinch, snow bunting, nuthatch, chickadee and wood duck. Each bird is treated via a pair of facing pages, with one carrying Conklin’s oil painting of the female sitting on the nest and the other painting showing the bird’s nest, complete with a number of eggs. Conklin transforms Nesting Grounds into a 1-10 counting book by increasing by one the number of eggs in the nest each time a new bird is introduced. Who could imagine that the cheery little chickadee lays clutches of nine eggs? Conklin’s nest paintings generally accurately capture the colourings of each bird’s eggs, and the eggs are presented in such a way that young “counters” should be able to arrive at the appropriate totals for each bird.

Each of the 10 birds is given four lines of text, with two lines being placed near the bottom of each page. The content of the poetry, with its abcb rhyme scheme, usually provides brief information about the materials the bird uses in building its nest and/or where the nest might be located. For example:

The Arctic tundra’s treeless plains,
The Snow Bunting’s eggs can weather.

Her nest in rocks and crevices,
Is moss, roots, grass, and feathers.

As noted in the opening line of the review, Nesting Grounds should be seen as an introduction to a number of birds and not be considered as a field guide to these birds. In many cases, such as the sparrow and goldfinch, Conklin’s painting reveals only a portion of a bird’s body, thereby making it difficult for a child to recognize that bird in the wild. Additionally, while the females of some of the book’s 10 bird species, such as the robin and chickadee, have strong resemblances to the males, others, like the wood duck and the hummingbird, look quite different from their gaudy male partners.

The quality of the paintings does vary, with some, like the robin and the plover, being quite recognizable while Conklin’s renderings of others, like the snow bunting and gold finch, are less successful. A note at the end of the book explains that the original oil paintings were 6x6 inches in size; however, the book’s pages measure 8 ½ x 8 ½ inches, and unfortunately this magnification can draw attention to the canvas on which the oil paint was applied. A seemingly heavy application of oil paint has left the wood duck’s eggs with an apparent texture when their surface should have been smooth. Using a much larger canvas for the original paintings and then photographically reducing them for publication would have led to a more polished product.