{"id":5517,"date":"2013-09-08T17:48:45","date_gmt":"2013-09-08T21:48:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lettersandsodas.com\/books\/?p=5517"},"modified":"2013-09-08T17:48:45","modified_gmt":"2013-09-08T21:48:45","slug":"look-up-bird-watching-in-your-own-backyard-by-annette-leblanc-catecandlewick-press-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/look-up-bird-watching-in-your-own-backyard-by-annette-leblanc-catecandlewick-press-2013\/","title":{"rendered":"Look Up! Bird-Watching in Your Own Backyard by Annette LeBlanc CateCandlewick Press, 2013"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Annette LeBlanc Cate is a hobbyist bird-watcher, an enthusiastic amateur rather than an expert, which is definitely a strength of this non-fiction picture book that serves as an introduction to birdwatching for kids. I like that the author emphasizes that anyone can watch birds, anywhere: you just need to pay attention (and it helps if you take notes\/draw the birds you&#8217;re looking at). The ink and watercolor illustrations of this book are charming and funny and sometimes downright lovely: there are lots of cartoon birds complete with speech bubbles, and sometimes the layout is in panels like a comic, but my favorite pages were the ones with bigger\/simpler background illustrations, like the one below that shows a branch of a tree with various birds perched on it, against a peach\/orange sunrise-colored sky. Some of the spreads are a bit busy for me, though I do like the pages showing birds by color (a rainbow of birds, a page of black-and-white birds, a page of brown birds). And I like the strategies the book introduces, like: when you&#8217;re looking at a bird, pay attention to how it&#8217;s shaped, and what that might tell you about it (for example: you can probably tell birds that fish from birds that don&#8217;t, which is illustrated hilariously with a series of illustrations of a cardinal trying to fish, and not doing so well). <\/p>\n<p><center><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/plangently\/9705644786\/\" title=\"Look Up! by plangently, on Flickr\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm4.staticflickr.com\/3818\/9705644786_29163ea022.jpg\" width=\"500\" height=\"367\" alt=\"Look Up!\"><\/a><\/center><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Annette LeBlanc Cate is a hobbyist bird-watcher, an enthusiastic amateur rather than an expert, which is definitely a strength of this non-fiction picture book that serves as an introduction to birdwatching for kids. I like that the author emphasizes that anyone can watch birds, anywhere: you just need to pay attention (and it helps if [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-picture-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5517"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5517\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}