The Boy Who Drew Birds by Jacqueline Davies

Highly recommend though note if you have sensitive readers there is one spread in the story that shows photographic items from Audubon's attic 'museum' and the dead, dried frog and lizard might be a bit too much realism for them. The illustrations are excellent with both the historical feel of the settings and the naturalist aspects conveying ideas of Audubon's sketches and notebooks.

I appreciate that Audubon's painting of the Pewee Flycatcher (now called the Eastern Phoebe) from 1825 is included. The notes and bibliography at the back round out the story. And, of course, they did! The story is full of his joy and exuberance as a budding naturalist and artist, though it did pain me to hear that he burned all of his artwork on his birthday every year because he didn't feel it was good enough yet. One scientist claimed that birds traveled to the moon each fall and returned in the spring (a trip taking 60 days)! (You should have seen my kids' faces when I read this! They were so astonished and amused!) Audubon came up with the idea of tying a string to the legs of the fledgling phoebe birds in the so he could see if they came back the following spring. Others believed birds transformed from one kind to another each winter.

Some agreed with Aristotle's two-thousand-year old theory that small birds hibernated under water or in hollow logs all winter. The story focuses on his time in America and his study of the phoebe bird and trying to definitively answer two questions that had pestered scientists for over two thousand years: Where do small birds go in the winter? Do the same birds come back to the same nests each spring? In the early 1800s, scientists had differing viewpoints.

4.5 STARS Wonderful biography of John James Audubon's early years as a naturalist and artist.

The Boy Who Drew Birds by Jacqueline Davies