RIDE THE WIND

Birds, butterflies, bats, spiders, and seeds journey on the air: blown by the wind, flying, gliding, and ballooning. Some animals follow a cycle of migration, while others make one-way journeys to new places. Simon (Wild Babies, p. 64, etc.) describes at length (for the format) some of the mechanisms of and reasons for flight, devoting most of the book to annual migrations of birds and insects, devoting a page of text each to the Arctic tern, American golden plover, albatross, lesser snow goose, swallow, monarch butterfly, locust, greylag goose, and free-tailed bat, among others. The pages devoted to ballooning spiders and seed dispersal become marginal by comparison. Warnick, in her first book, produces gray-green washed watercolors that are handsome but lack precision and details, e.g., the monarch shown in the life cycle looks frail and incomplete. (Nonfiction. 10-12)