TREE HOLE HOMES

Thinking outside the nest, here’s a gallery of arboreal residents, from tree frogs to birds and bobcats.

Stewart invites readers to join her in visualizing some of the animal residents known to use hollowed-out spaces in tree trunks and imagining what such a home would be like. A solitary fisher, for instance, would find calm and quiet in such a hole. Not so a mother raccoon with a passel of cubs. A well-placed hole makes a good nesting site for wood ducks and eastern bluebirds, a daytime refuge for a nocturnal Liberian tree hole crab, a “nighttime nook” for a black spiny-tailed iguana, or even a cozy place for an American black bear to bed down for the winter. Working with acrylic and marker on wood to create suitably suggestive surfaces and backgrounds, Hevron creates intimate close-ups of stylized but easily recognizable creatures peering out or in cross-sectional views nestling down. She also depicts a light-skinned young explorer slipping into a big trunk’s ground level cavity to read and think about how such found places provide temporary escape from the outside world’s distractions. The author adds notes about each animal’s preferred habitat, diet, and other details both in the narrative and at the end. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A lofty mix of nature facts and rumination.