Category Archives: Animals

My latest book: Super Navigators

Natural history and ethology, the science of animal behavior, have been interests of mine for a long time. That made it both an honor and a lot of fun for me to adapt David Barrie’s fascinating book Supernavigators into this version for young readers.

Illustrator Qu Lan and Tra Publishing outdid themselves, producing a book that is almost as beautiful as the many creatures in the natural world that it celebrates.

People also navigate through the world, and the book talks about how they do it. After all, we’re animals, too!

New nonfiction on the way

I can’t announce the details quite yet, but I’m delighted to have a new nonfiction adaptation in the works. It will be an illustrated book for kids 8 to 12 years old on a fascinating topic in animal behavior. The original book is wonderful, well researched and entertaining; it will be fun as well as challenging to adapt it for a younger audience.

Sluggo

Just now when I took the cat for a walk I spotted this 6-inch beauty on our retaining wall. I love these guys. In the lower right that thing that looks like a rat dropping is a much smaller slug, clearly thinking, “When I grow up, I want to be just like you, Dad.”p3160032

Over the Arachnids at last

Today I finally finished and sent in the ms. for a book on Arachnids that is part of a kids’ series I’m doing on various taxons: flowering plants, primates, rodents, marsupials (that one was a treat to research and write!), and so on.

I suspect that my editor rather enjoyed having me do the Arachnids book, knowing that I am a pronounced arachnophobe. Or at least  a spider-phobe. I’ve never seen a live scorpion, amblypygid, uropygid, or member of many of the smaller arachnid orders. I don’t know how I’d react to them, but I doubt I’d be as shocked and repelled as when a spider scuttles out from beneath my hairbrush. Nonetheless, they are truly fascinating creatures, and it was quite a lot of fun to write about them.

This was actually my second book about spiders. Some years ago I wrote a picture book about them for very young kids. The one I finished today was for middle-school kids. I’ll be finishing up this current series soon, and I’ll be sad to see it end. It’s going out with a whimper, too. The last book is going to be about, Dawkins help me (and I mean that literally, as I have found some useful material in The Ancestor’s Tale), bacteria.