Customer Reviews

Birdsongs

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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

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.

My daughter really enjoyed this book. The illustrations are beautifully rendered in rich colors and textures, and my daughter was captivated. She also liked listening to me reproduce the songs described on each page, from the quacking of the ducks to the screeching of the gulls. As to the comments about correctly identifying the birds, my impression was that terms like "red-capped," "chipping," and "white-cheeked," were merely adjectives that the author used to describe the appearance or behavior of the birds in question, not actual common names of each species. (Similar to describing my daughter as a wiggly, red-headed cutie-pie--it's not her official name, but it IS an accurate description.) I can't say what the author's intent was, but that was how I read the text.

My undergraduate degree was in ecology, and I spent a fair amount of time doing field work. I found the illustrations in this book to be quite faithful to reality, with strong visual appeal for young readers. In terms of its overall accuracy, while I wouldn't use this book to train an ornithologist, I think it does a great job of teaching children about the natural world, with the added bonus of a counting lesson. Despite all of my reasons for liking this book, in the end, my daughter's enthusiasm and enjoyment of it speak for themselves.

I was considering purchasing this book after checking it out at our local library. My son who is almost 3 years old really enjoyed the book, but my mother who is an avid birdwatcher noted that several birds were not identified correctly. This turned me off to purchasing the book, but the fact is that although it may not be accurate in naming the birds, this book was definitely a favorite for my son.