A Day in the Life of Birds: What Do Flamingos, Owls, and Penguins Get Up to All Day?

A Day in the Life of Birds will attract a young audience for its refreshing approach to a familiar science topic. In an hourly agenda style for only one day, it presents examples of birds from various global locations. Rather than learning about the daily activities of a single bird species, instead, we meet a new bird each hour. We get a glimpse of one species’ courtship, nesting habits of another, how yet a different one feeds its young, migration details and hunting habits of others. From hummingbirds just warming up at 6 AM from nighttime torpor, we view spoon-billed sandpipers taking their young to feed on shoreline mud flats at 1 PM, and barn owls heading out in the dusk at 9 PM to hunt. The author limits the focus to a single habit of each species; taken together, they give the reader an overall picture, using simple, informal explanations, of the many facets of bird life. There’s an interesting mix of birds that spend their time in colonies or large flocks along with those that lead more solitary lives.

In a departure from the double spreads that deal with particular species activities, several pages of general information are positioned throughout the book. A page of “Nests and Eggs”, for instance, shows five bird species with nest habits: the maleo buries eggs in a group nest, the eider duck has the warmest nest lining of feathers, the kiwi lays one giant egg. Other similar pages deal with “Flight” and “Dinnertime”. A Glossary helps with new terms, and an Index aids access to specific topics.

The design is attractive and easy to follow with small chunks of text clearly separated in a variety of boxes, random shapes, and with different text/illustration placement on each page. Key phrases use bold type to stand out, such as “holding up to 30 fish at once ”, and “adaptation is called convergent evolution ” for the tufted puffin. Boldly colored, stylized drawings highlight field marks, offering young readers an early lesson in how to recognize species. One exception: the page for 7 PM, Sky Dancing, is impressive for showing the mass gatherings of starlings, called murmurations, but we’re not given a closeup view of that species.

A Day in the Life of Birds is part of a series, “A Day in the Life”, that covers a selection of nature topics. It is a fun way to learn about wildlife and their habits.