Busy, Busy Birds

Illustrated with Valério’s recognizable collage illustrations, the board book Busy, Busy Birds is a vocabulary builder that uses the activities of North American birds as its organizing theme. In addition to this very simple patterned text, Valério also identifies the bird associated with the specific action. And so the excerpt’s “floater” was an “Osprey” while the “wader” was a “Golden Eagle”. Because these two birds are quite large, Valério presents each on a double-page spread, but, when the bird pairings are small, they appear on facing pages as occurs with the “Pileated Woodpecker” (“Some birds peck.”) and the “Western Tanager” (“Other birds snap.”) In total, Busy, Busy Birds offers seven such vocabulary pairings. Most of the book’s birds will not be personally familiar to urban children as the birds’ normal habitats are rural. The final two illustrated spreads consist of a riot of unidentified birds; however, some will likely be known by the adults who are sharing the book with a child.

Should members of this board book’s audience display an interest in birds, they could be introduced to Valério’s longer 2016 title, My Book of Birds, which is aimed at older readers.