My boys loved this. They thought it was very clever that Peter Rabbit is a character in the book. I paired this with coloring pages of each bird that we read about, and I also used recordings and bird calls from the Cornell Lab. We really had a great time with this, and we are very excited to currently be reading the Burgess Animal Book. My kids just love these character.

3 stars
Read in preparation for Ambleside Online year 1. It's cute and informative and the illustrations are nice but the plot is so repetitive I was bored to tears. The red tailed hawk, bob white quail, and the cardinal were the only birds that live in or pass through our area. I think we'll find a field guide to supplement and some videos or audio of bird songs/calls too.

Lots of information! You have to read this one slowly.

(with Ben and Mabry)

Beautifully written

Fun, colorful vocabulary painted beautiful pictures of Peter rabbit's world. We grew to know peter rabbit in an even deeper way as he asks questions about so many different bird families.

Another classic read!
Doesn't everyone love Peter rabbit?
Fun! Cute!
Educational!
Beautifuly illustrated!
Wow!

This was a read-aloud living-science book with my 5, 7, and 10YO, and it ended up being one of our favorites thus far. We all learned so much about different birds, their habitats, their diet, and their characteristics in a joyful, memorable way. As laid out in Simply Charlotte Mason's "Learning About Birds with Thorton Burgess" curriculum, the kids colored a picture of each bird (in the "Fifty Favorite Birds" coloring book) while I read a single chapter aloud. It's a pleasant story (not at all a textbook), but we learned more about birds in it than we ever would have using a textbook. Ahh, the beauties of homeschooling! Learning can be fun, engaging, and beautiful. In fact, my 5YO was the first to spot two of the birds we'd studied in our own back yard! After that, we kept an eye out and have met a good number more, due to meeting them first in this book.
I should probably mention that the illustrations drew me in to this particular version of the book, and it's worth having, but I did end up making my own dropbox with a striking photo of each bird, and had that airplay on the TV screen while reading. That greatly helped with learning them by sight. And for the birds that we read about their particular calls I would do a quick YouTube search so we could hear them. It was a delightful study. We all now recognize a good number more birds, and appreciate the vast variety of them within creation. Lovely!

Enchanting. Hands down, one of the best children’s books ever written.

When paired with drawings and calls of the birds it describes, this book is a sweet introduction for children to natural sciences.

Enjoyed but didn't finish for school. Got a little bogged down with the bird descriptions. Although I did identify a flycatcher in AZ because of this book. Maybe we will pick it up again down the road.

My favorite book as a child was without a doubt the Burgess Bird Book for Children. I read my copy of it so many times I wore out the spine.

I dearly loved Jenny Wren, Sweet Voice the Vesper Sparrow, and Longbill the Woodcock, and looked for them everywhere as a child. Sadly my understanding of migration patterns and setting was, ahem, underdeveloped.

Jenny, Sweet Voice, and Longbill visit the Old Orchard and the Green Forest in summer, so that’s when I looked for them. Unfortunately I failed to realize that the Old Orchard and the Green Forest are in Massachusetts, and that when Jenny talked of flying South for the winter, she was talking about going to my neighborhood in Texas. I needed to be looking for those birds in winter, not summer. Which sort of explains why I never saw any of them except for Sally Sly the Cowbird and Blacky the Crow.

Still, I love this book. So after learning that I was pregnant some years ago, I immediately hunted down my old copy. When I saw its tattered condition (the cover on the spine is literally hanging by a thread), I ordered a backup copy from Amazon from roughly the same era. My initial plan was to let the backup copy take the abuse of repeated mother-daughter readings, then once she was well and truly hooked, show The Four-Year-Old the original Family Heirloom.

At least, that was the plan. Naturally, The Four-Year-Old much prefers to read the actual book I read as a child, so the backup copy’s most onerous task to date has been to pose for this post.

Reading the book to my daughter has reminded me of how much fun this book is to read. It’s packed with information about the birds of our area–what they look like, what they eat, where and how they build their nests, and how they care for their children–but unlike other packed-with-real-information books it’s not boring. Peter asks the same type of questions The Four-Year-Old would, and Jenny is such a snippy old gossip the learning ends up being quite easy on the mind.

It’s fun too to be finally reading this book in the part of the country where the events take place. Not that geographic location is at all required to enjoy the story. I loved this book long before I ever considered moving to Massachusetts. But it is nice to be able to make the story more real for The Four-Year-Old by reminding her of the time we spotted Downy the Woodpecker at Moose Hill.

My one complaint about this book is that it doesn’t include illustrations of every bird it mentions. I know, I know, the cost of doing that back in 1919 when it was first published was probably prohibitive. But it can be difficult to picture a bird from a verbal description alone. So if you do decide to read this book, it’s a good idea to have a copy of Birds of Boston (or your preferred field guide to North American birds) handy as well, so that you can show your child pictures of the birds that didn’t rate their own illustrations as they come up in the story.

A final note on acquiring this book. Many of the newer editions have black-and-white versions of the original illustrations. If you want your child to be able to spot these birds in the wild, it’s worth it to hunt down a copy that presents those illustrations in color. If you can’t find one for a reasonable price though, pairing a black and white edition with a color field guide from your local library should do the trick.

(Review originally posted on my blog, Caterpickles.com --and that other blog I do, Bostonwriters.wordpress.com -- after all, who can have just one blog?

Enjoyable book. We read it as a bedtime story, and it kept the kids entertained. It also has lots of good bird info. Occasionally the descriptions got a bit long winded, and some of the wording is a bit awkward.