Picture Books About Birds

Posted on May 6, 2021 at 8:17 am by Gene Ambaum

Perfect Pigeons by Katherine Battersby. Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2020. 9781534457812.

Battersby draws this “perfect” group of pigeons with an epic amount of color and personality. The pigeon who is not the same as the others, the one who sleeps in a hammock and flies with a cape and wears that colorful scarf on the cover, shows the rest what would happen if they all did whatever they felt like. (Spoiler: life is even better.) Bonus: the book ends with a pro-reading moment.

How To Find A Bird by Jennifer Ward, illustrated by Diana Sudyka. Beach Lane Books, 2020. 9781481467056.

I normally wouldn’t go for a quiet and lovely picture book like this, but Sudyka’s illustrations are delightful and just the slightest bit cartoony in a way that makes me love this book. And the two happy kids finding birds in their natural habitats (including city streets and a suburban yard) give birdwatching a sense of fun.

The Chicken Who Couldn’t by Jan Thomas. Beach Lane Books, 2020. 9781416996996.

A chicken falls out of a truck and needs to walk all the way back to the farm, but it just can’t. Other animals offer it encouragement and suggestions and warn it about the fox on the road. Then the chicken gets its head stuck in a hole when it tries to hide. Thomas somehow manages to turn the whole incident, and an eventual run-in with the fox, into a moment of self actualization for the chicken. It’s silly, and it’s comics, so win-win.