Birdsongs [Hardcover]

Betsy Franco (Author), Steve Jenkins (Illustrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 9, 2007 | Age Level: 3 and up

The sky is quiet.

The yard is quiet.

The creek is quietly gurgling.

Then...tat, tat, tat, tat, tat, tat, tat, tat, tat, tat! A red-capped woodpecker starts his rap for the day. Next comes nine soft coos from the mourning doves, followed by the chipping of a flurry of sparrows. And on go the birdsongs throughout the day.

Celebrate neighborhood birds in this poetic picture book, and count their sounds backward from ten to one, until all is quiet in the yard again.

Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

PreSchool-Grade 2—This lavishly illustrated count-it-down story describes a day filled with birdsong. At sunrise, a woodpecker "raps a tap dance with his beak, pecking 10 times as he looks for breakfast bugs." The illustration shows a dazzling redheaded woodpecker working on a tree, with 10 "tats" in various sizes scattered across the pages. Each successive spread features a different type of bird with a declining number of utterances. For example, mourning doves land on a telephone wire and "coo" to one another nine times; sparrows crowd around a bird feeder and emit eight "chirps." At day's end, a mockingbird mimics all of the songs she has heard, resulting in a true cacophony of sounds (and a fun challenge for reading aloud). In his vivid, realistic-looking collages, Jenkins uses accurate textures and colors for each species, and creates the appearance of depth, light, and warmth (the chickadees, described as making a tree look "like a candelabra," are divine). The writing is lyrical and engaging, and quick "feathery facts" about the creatures are appended. This book, which pairs nicely with Aileen Fisher's Know What I Saw? (Roaring Brook, 2005) and Ann Jonas's Bird Talk (Greenwillow, 1999), will engender a love for birds and an awareness of their unique music.—Teresa Pfeifer, Alfred Zanetti Montessori Magnet School, Springfield, MA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Jenkins' signature collages of shaped, painted, and textured papers once again dazzle the eye and warm the imagination. Franco spins a nature lesson in lucid language and throws in a counting exercise, too. Just after daybreak, a woodpecker "raps a tap dance with his beak" 10 times. The tat-tat-tats are sprinkled across the spread in varying font sizes. Mourning doves coo nine times. The dee-dee-dees--six of them--from the chickadees are interrupted by the appearance of the cat. Jenkins works astonishing detail into the close-ups of his avian subjects, and Franco's fresh imagery (enough chickadees in a tree to make it look like a candelabra and a robins "heavy with eggs") counts down to the hummingbird's one tiny sound. At dusk, the mockingbird repeats every song she has heard all day. Charming. GraceAnne DeCandido
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 3 and up
  
• Hardcover: 40 pages
• Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books (January 9, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0689877773
• ISBN-13: 978-0689877773
• Product Dimensions: 10.5 x 10.1 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #893,165 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Inaccurate Details, August 6, 2008

By 

Janet Townsend "Janet Townsend, a Librarian" (Hayward, California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Birdsongs (Hardcover)

This book is beautifully written, as you can see from the other reviews, but is surprisingly inaccurate and uneven in identifying the birds throughout the book. The first entry is identified as a red-capped woodpecker, but there is no such species in North America, and perhaps not anywhere else. The beautiful illustration depicts a red-headed woodpecker instead. Don't know why it is called a red-capped woodpecker by the author. On another page, some sparrows are called chipping sparrows, which is a North American species, but the birds depicted are house sparrows. Didn't the author and illustrator collaborate at all? The mourning doves are depicted accurately, at least, but the chickadees on another page are called white-cheeked chickadees, and there is no such chickadee species. Is the author just trying to describe the chickadees, which do have white cheeks? Other birds are just named generically, such as a "gull" and a "thrasher." This is a delightful book overall, but it seems that anyone writing a book like this would have done a better job of naming the birds (which is easy to do) and in collaborating with an illustrator. It seriously lacks some of its educational value, and that's a shame.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Worth Singing About!, September 24, 2007

By 

Mary Hynes-Berry "Mary H-B" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Birdsongs (Hardcover)

Franco and Jenkin's Birdsongs is one of those picture books you can return to again and again and find something new each time. It could be especially rich for use in an early childhood classroom where the graphics and text offer a wonderful exploration of patterns--there are the patterns and sounds of the differnt birds shown on each page, the pattern of the day from dawn to nightfall, and the counting down number pattern shown by the number of birds, and repetitions of that species unique call and

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Plenty of facts about different kinds of birds and their habits, January 6, 2007

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Birdsongs (Hardcover)

Betsy Franco and Steve Jenkins' BIRDSONGS celebrates neighborhood birds, reading like fiction but incorporating plenty of facts about different kinds of birds and their habits. From a tree of chickadees to the caw of the crow, kids are invited to learn the sounds of nature, and to understand bird habits.