Backyard Bear [Hardcover]

Anne Rockwell (Author), Megan Halsey (Illustrator)

Book Description

Age Level: 4 and up

Bears belong in the woods--they can find everything they need to survive there.  But what happens when people start knocking down trees and building houses where the woods used to be?  This young black bear is about to find out.  He wakes one spring to find his territory completely changed. When the curious bear dares to come closer and closer to the houses, he discovers backyards and trashcans are an easy place to find food. But it's dangerous for people and bears to live so close together.  What will happen when the bear is discovered right in someone's backyard?

Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

Kindergarten-Grade 3–After a cub's mother leaves him to fend for himself, he ventures away from his forest home and close to neighborhoods and people. While the young bear is initially fearful of humans, he soon realizes that tasty items await him in backyards. One autumn afternoon, a family contacts the game warden, and the animal is soon safely trapped and returned to the forest, where he can continue his life as a wild bear. An author's note offers details about black bears and ideas for keeping backyards less tempting. A good read-aloud for the kindergarten crew, Rockwell's text is simple and straightforward enough for beginning readers. The pen-and-ink and watercolor illustrations on toned paper are lovely. This combination of fiction and fact is most appealing.–Andrea Tarr, Corona Public Library, CA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

In a story that would comfortably fit in both picture-book and easy nonfiction collections, a mother bear enters a cave in the woods and gives birth to a cub. When spring comes, the bears pass the seasons in the wild until it's time to hibernate. Upon emerging from their cave the next spring, however, they find that the woods have given way to a housing development. When the cub is spotted rummaging through the garbage near one of the houses, the game warden comes to relocate the cub "far away from the new houses to a place where bears could roam." A short author's note explains the plight of bears in populated areas and gives a few suggestions to keep bears away. With cartoon-style figures in uncluttered settings, the pen-and-ink and muted watercolor illustrations, set against pale orange backgrounds, complement the simplicity of the text, making the story and the conservation message it conveys accessible to very young audiences. Randall Enos
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 4 and up
  
• Hardcover: 32 pages
• Publisher: Walker Books for Young Readers; First Edition edition (October 3, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802795749
• ISBN-13: 978-0802795748
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 8.1 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,337,245 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars 4 1/2 The Bear Facts, February 3, 2007

By 

M. Allen Greenbaum (California) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Backyard Bear (Hardcover)

This warmly illustrated book is of the "nature can be cruel" school most famously seen in Disney-produced documentaries of the 1960's (that whole food cycle bird-eats-snake-that-just-ate-a-rat that's the way it is genre). There's nothing inherently wrong with this; in fact, Rockwell and illustrator Halsey are factual and their story is fascinating. However, don't get this expecting a cozy, lulling bedtime story--unless your little one gets soporific at the thought of mothers instintively abandoning their offspring.

The ochre backgrounds and foliage do feel soft; however, as does the young, hungry cub. His mother shows him "how to dig for roots and grubs to eat." Over to the left of this 2-page spread, we see soft blue robbins' eggs "alone in a nest." Look out robbins! These were "very speacial treats." Like the bears' predatory habits, the mother-cub relationship is established early: "If the bear strayed too far from his mother, she gave him scolding grunts." The bears grows up, getting bigger and wiser thanks to his mom. However, there comes a time when mother bears leave their now-independent younger ones. There are no promises to visit in the Spring or singing daffodils: One morning, the cub's mother wouldn't play with him. Instead she grunted fiercely and cuffed his nose.

Wisely, Halsey doesn't over-cute or otherwise anthropomorphize the young bear; we see a bear possessed of bear intelligence and emotions, not human ones that young readers might easily identify with (although this might happen anyway). THis is fortunate, because the next few scenes describe the bear crying for his mother, hearing a loud crash when workers cut down a tree they used to climb. The cub climbs another tree, "crying and crying, but his mother didn't come back. That's the way it is when bear cubs get big."

Suburban Renewal
The trees come down because the forest must be cleared for new houses, and the cub wanders down to a backyard, where a toddler excitedly calls "Bah!," because that's what he calls his teddy bear. (In her informative Afterward, Rockwell describes how clearing forests in her state of Connecticut increased bear sightings in backyards and malls. While offering some practical tips--cleaning fallen fruit, using bear-proof garbage containers--she doesn't suggest restricting construction, only than that we should "keep bears in the wild woods, where they belong." However, a political discussion is really beyond the scope and audience of this book!)

A realisitically frightened mother brings her boy inside and calls the state game warden, while a neighbor's dog barks at the beleagured bear. Lured by marshmellows, the bear is trapped and shot with tranquilizers by two (friendly-looking) wardens, and he is returned to a new home, full of nuts, acorns, trees, and a cave where he will hibernate during the winter--just as he's done every year since birth. Anne Rockwell (in the Afterward) responsibly points out the difference between the smaller black bears of her story, and the larger, more aggressive grizzly bears of the West. ALthough I loved the beautifully shaded, soft pictures, and the fiction/fact combination, this is not a bear story for everyone. Young naturalists will enjoy it. You can review Rockwell's other nature books at her website www.annerockwell.com.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Just one complaint, April 10, 2007

By 

Kathy O. "suzanne312" (Illinois, United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Backyard Bear (Hardcover)

This is an attractive book with an essentially nice story. But the only thing my three-year-old remembered about it (when he described it to his dad after we'd read it earlier in the day) was that "the baby bear's mama went away and he cried and cried but he still couldn't find her." My son was pretty distressed about that, and I don't think we'll be reading this one again.