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Survival at a Mountain Top

16/6/2020

 
Picture
Have you ever heard of a pika? It was a new animal to me.  It lives in mountains at 10,000 feet and, as a skier, I have been to its habitat many times but didn't know where or how to look for it.  
Thanks to Pika Country: Climate Change at the Top of the World by Dorothy Hinshaw Patent & Marlo Garnsworthy, I am now enlightened.  The pika, also know as a rock rabbit,  is yet another version of a canary in a coal mine.  It requires cool summer temperatures to forage for food, (mostly grasses that dry to become hay) and stockpile enough to stay alive all winter.  

                     "Pikas are specially adapted to live in the chilly alpine environment among
                       the rocks and plants.
                      "In fact, pikas are usually only found in the mountains where the temperatures
                        are cool.  In temperatures warmer than 77 degrees Fahrenheit (25 degrees Celsius),                            pikas quickly overheat and die."

Pika Country, illustrated with photographs by skilled nature photographer Dan Hartman, is a picture book with intimate images of the pika barking, leaping, squeezing into a small rock crevasse, and carrying a mouthful of vegetation.  How did he ever get those shots?  Obviously, he had to be there, be ready and be patient.

The poor pika is prey to mountain mammals, like the weasel and fox and raptors, including the golden eagle and the prairie falcon.  Added to its woes, its habitat is shrinking due to climate change.  Where can you go when you're at the top of the hill and there's no more "up" to go?

The authors are exceptionally good at explaining the predicament by including many other alpine animals and trees that will be wiped out when mountain tops warm up.

They also include an excellent explanation of climate change and what kids (and caring adults) can do to slow down climate change.  Maybe it will also create the demise of the winter olympics? 

A Candidate for a Child's Home Library

7/5/2020

 
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In my last post, I quoted a literacy statistic for a children's home library, "Children growing up in homes with at least twenty books get three years more schooling than children from bookless homes, independent of their parents’ education, occupation, and class." A children's home library contains books that, by definition,  will be read more than once. Roxie Munro's glorious adventure under water on a coral reef, Dive In: Swim with Sea Creatures at Their Actual Size, is a perfect candidate.  

Dive In is enticing on so many levels.  As someone who has had the memorable experience of snorkeling at the Great Barrier Reef, once was not enough but once is all I got.  Munro's book powerfully creates the experience. You are immersed and absorbed,  never leaving the sea, viewing 29 of the gorgeous, quirky, fantastical inhabitants of coral reefs.  It deserves to be revisited time and time again.  

Did you ever hear of a spotted cleaner shrimp or a longsnout seahorse or the queen triggerfish, to name a few?  And what's that gray thing that starts looming in the background on 15,16, 17, 18 and  folds out into two double-spreads on pages 19-22 to reveal a reef shark that is 8 feet long?  (Measuring that critter, alone, is worth owning the book.)  

This is a book that commands study and involvement that goes way beyond the five-minute bedtime read.  Munro includes a simple fact or two  for each critter that are gems:
      
          "The common octopus is a mollusk, as are snails, clams, and squids.  Like a squid,
            an octopus also changes colors and patterns to camouflage itself.  An octopus has
            excellent vision and a large brain, and is considered the most intelligent, 
            invertebrate.  It even uses tools to build its den, which might feature a door that
            opens and closes!"

My kid-like curious brain is teeming with questions to know more. If it's a mollusk, where's its shell? How many colors can it be? How do we know that?  What does its eyes have to do with the size of its brain?  

The back-matter reveals a key to the 29 different species as a "walk in the park" diagram including the relative sizes depicted as actual size in the book.  Yep, there's the reef shark, taking up space in the middle.  And the end papers feature coral reefs of the world, including the one I dove into.

Roxie Munro brings the skills of a fine artist and the discipline of a diligent nonfiction author to revealing a complex and glorious ecosystem currently under attack from global warming.  

If Dive In is the first book on coral reefs in a child's library, it will not be the last.  







     Vicki Cobb

    *Award-winning author of more than 90 nonfiction books for children, mostly in science.
    *Former Contributor to the Huffington Post
    *Founder/President of iNK Think Tank, Inc.
    *Passionate advocate for the joy of learning for every child and teacher.


    Disclaimer: All opinions, typos, and grammatical errors are my own,  especially small word omissions which I often don't notice in my fervor.  

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iNK Think Tank, Inc. is a nonprofit with the mission of using nonfiction children's literature in classrooms

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