From GoodReads:
He wears a black band on his lower right leg and an orange flag on his upper left, bearing the laser inscription B95. Scientists call him the Moonbird because, in the course of his astoundingly long lifetime, this gritty, four-ounce marathoner has flown the distance to the moon—and halfway back!
B95 is a robin-sized shorebird, a red knot of the subspecies rufa. Each February he joins a flock that lifts off from Tierra del Fuego, headed for breeding grounds in the Canadian Arctic, nine thousand miles away. Late in the summer, he begins the return journey.
B95 can fly for days without eating or sleeping, but eventually he must descend to refuel and rest. However, recent changes at ancient refueling stations along his migratory circuit—changes caused mostly by human activity—have reduced the food available and made it harder for the birds to reach. And so, since 1995, when B95 was first captured and banded, the worldwide rufa population has collapsed by nearly 80 percent. Most perish somewhere along the great hemispheric circuit, but the Moonbird wings on. He has been seen as recently as November 2011, which makes him nearly twenty years old. Shaking their heads, scientists ask themselves: How can this one bird make it year after year when so many others fall?
In the interest of full disclosure, I am a sucker for birds. While many librarians are crazy cat ladies, I am a crazy bird lady. We own seven. So of course I read this book, right? Well, I almost didn’t. I got about halfway through the first chapter and found myself incredibly frustrated with the sidebars that kept interrupting my reading. They either cut off the paragraph I was in the middle of or horned in on the side crying out for attention, right in the middle of my sentence. It’s apparently been awhile since I’ve read any nonfiction intended for a young audience or a textbook. I like sidebars, and these had a lot of excellent and pertinent information, but who placed them in the book? Jeez. They were so distracting.
Sidebar rant aside, this is a book about one incredible bird, a bird who has lived nearly 2o years to fly the equivalent of the distance to the moon and at least halfway back. It’s also the story of his species and many other speices. The book does a brilliant job of subtley showing its audience how all things in nature are connected and how all our actions have an impact. In the end this is a book about conservation, but it addresses a polarizing and touchy subject lightly and by employing such a remarkable and unlikely hero that it never feels like preaching.
I was constantly reminded of the documentary Winged Migration, the movie Fly Away Home and even Project UltraSwan. Kids need stories like all these as they are the kind that inspire children to want to be conservationists, biologists, or ornithologists. Or just simply to get outside.
athomelibrarian 