Finding home Amazing places animals live

Chapters present a window into the home-making habits of 20 species in a friendly, reference-like work that ranges across clownfish, meerkats, puffins, and termites. Conversational prose relates the myriad animals' homes to modern-day objects and activities. A bald eagle's nest is compared to the game Jenga, and a wasp's work is described as akin to origami. The tone stays light even while packing in a lot of information about animals' diets and habitats, and Unwin has a knack for noting memorable details, for instance describing how a snow leopard's "long, furry tail wraps around its face like a woolen scarf." In full-bleed scenes, Desmond employs watercolor, acrylic, ink, pencil, and pencil crayon techniques for an immersive effect that underscores the vastness of Earth's landscapes and the diversity of its inhabitants. Captions include surprising factoids, and a conclusion further emphasizes conservation. Ages 5--8. (Mar.)

A wide-angled survey of homes occupied or created by wild animals. Home, the author writes, "is where an animal feels safe." Each animal, described in meticulous detail, uses unique materials or strategic designs that offer protection--if not always comfort. Female rhinoceros hornbill birds wall themselves up inside trees with their eggs for four months, leaving just a small gap through which the male passes food. Most of the animals portrayed are diggers or builders, with some exceptions; oxpeckers, clownfish, and remoras are examples of small creatures that associate commensally with larger species. Except for an opening peek into a polar bear's dug-out snow den, Desmond sticks to external views, an approach that isn't always helpful; readers can examine the finely drawn structures of a beaver dam and the giant clay cooling towers built by cathedral termites, but images of the beavers' actual den and the underground colony are entirely absent. Still, graceful and accurately detailed nature scenes are full of such marvels: the "musical chairs" strawberry hermit crabs of different sizes playing with one another's discarded shells, masses of Mexican free-tailed bats hanging in a Texas cave, and a pair of astonishingly adept tailor birds stitching together the edges of a leaf to create a cozy, pocketlike nest. Natural engineering at its most astonishing.(Informational picture book. 8-11) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.