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Nature is both fascinating and boring. I’ve hardly ever been interested in it, even as a kid, besides all the
Amazon Affiliate Disclosure: I receive a percentage of revenue if you buy from Amazon on my blog (at no cost to you).
Nature is both fascinating and boring. I’ve hardly ever been interested in it, even as a kid, besides all the vicious animals. But now I have a son, and he’s going to ask questions. And I’m going to want to teach him things. So Mari and I thought it would be a good idea to pick up Fiona Cohen’s Curious Kids Nature Guide. As the explanatory title implies, the book revolves around the Pacific Northwest of the US, aka Cascadia: Washington, Oregon, the Alaskan panhandle, and Canada’s British Columbia. We’ve never been to this area, though we have friends there and hope to visit them one day. From the pictures I’ve seen, this area is beautiful.
The book organized in four sections: forest, beach, fresh water, and backyards, the four most accessible types of habitat kids can get to. Before Cohen moves into these sections, she gives some instructions to do before your kids get started.
- When you go into nature, stay quiet and still. Use your senses, and look patiently for animals big and small.
- Wear comfortable clothes so that you can stay comfortable during your foray into the wild.
- Take care of the nature (pick up litter and don’t feed the wildlife!).
- Don’t go alone.
Cohen writes about some of the common, everyday plants, animals, and fungi your kids will see. Some of the most common things can be the most interesting. The book can help them take a second (and third) look around at their surroundings.
Marni Fylling illustrated the book with precise detail. From mussels, to crabs, sea otters to moon jelly, blackbirds to yellow jackets, newts to beavers, the illustrations are of excellent quality. A paragraph or two (or sometimes three) is spent on many of the animals and facets of nature that kids and parents will find interesting.
- Woodpeckers have extra eyelids to keep their eyes from popping out of their heads when they drill into trees.
- A mussel’s glue both stretchy and stronger than steel. Take that, Spiderman.
- Periwinkles are tiny snails that are so strong you could feed them to a sea anemone and they would only come out unharmed and with a shinier shell.
- The “ribbit” of a pacific chorus frog can measure 90 decibels, “about as loud as a bulldozer engine” (61).
- Only female mosquitos are interested in your blood.
The books ends with the four seasons of the year and the when different animals do their seasonal activities.
As I wrote above, I’ve never even been to Cascadia, let alone live there, so I can’t comment on how accurate this book is. Regardless, this book was pretty cool. The downside was that this book doesn’t include some of nature’s more “beastly” animals like moose, elk, snakes, bears, wolves, cougars, skunks