- Mama Built a Little Nest by Jennifer Ward
This gallery of nest-building offers a look at fourteen different kinds of avian homes, each introduced with a rhyming quatrain, a brief prose description, and a fullspread illustration of the relevant nest and habitat. The nest-building possibilities are impressively varied, ranging from a hummingbird’s wee spiderweb-reinforced home through a grebe’s floating twig island nest to an eagle’s huge eyrie. Though occasionally the scansion of the poetry stumbles, most of the verses are neat and effective and some genuinely witty, and the overall point about the intricacy and diversity of birds’ nests is effectively made. Jenkins’ familiar cut-paper art is somewhat more painterly than usual at times, with soft striations in the cactus wren’s feathering and smoky dappling on the breast of the swiftlet, but his intricate geometry remains typically effective in its conveyance of details in the spiky cacti or the hummingbird’s knobbly little nest. A note glossing some of the terms and giving more information about the bird species would have been welcome; there is, however, a list of bird-related website resources.