Time to Go!

When a migrating bird reminds the others that “It’s time to get moving!”, a trio of birds decide that they are not going to join the migration. They are pleased with their decision until they are buffeted by cold fall rains and then snow. Striving to keep warm, their first solution is “Let’s wear coats, like humans.” That idea works until the birds are blown off their perch by the winter winds, and, with their wings encased by the coats, they tumble to the ground. Solution number two is to “live in the water like a fish”, however, in addition to the water’s being freezing cold, the birds have overlooked the need to breathe! And so on to their third solution: “How about we find a hole to sleep in all winter, like bears do?” While their combined body heat in the confined space does keep them warm, eventually their increasing hunger, coupled with the boredom of doing nothing, leads to a new solution: “Let’s fly south!”, and so they do, arriving just in time to see the flock they have joined about to fly north. Cunill’s delightful ending suggests that perhaps this threesome has yet to learn its lesson.

Young readers will adore the humour in this short graphic “novel”. Cunill’s illustrations of the three principal birds, one green, another red, and the final, purple, are simply rendered, but they are full of character and action. While Time to Go!, told essentially via speech bubbles, is an obvious pleasure read, its contents could also be connected to a science unit on animals’ responses to seasonal change.