Booklist
Gr. 4-6. The natural history diarist who earned a Sibert Honor for My Season with Penguins: An Antarctic Journal (2000) now invites readers to join her aboard the Alpha Helix, a research vessel, on a month-long expedition to the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. She is there to count seabirds, whose population density can help researchers gauge the ocean's health. The birds involved here probably won't garner the same instant enthusiasm among young children as waddling, tuxedoed penguins, and Webb's shipboard vantage point precludes the hands-on interactions that enlivened her first book. However, the text and accompanying watercolors are just as brimming with gritty details (it's wise not to serve spherical foods on a boat, because they roll off the plate), and children will feel Webb's delight in the moments that make the rigors of field research worth it: a glimpse of Crested Auklets "like something out of Dr. Seuss' imagination" or an albatross that commutes from Hawaii to Alaska to collect food, then backtracks 5,600 miles to nourish its waiting chicks. Jennifer Mattson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Book Description
To human eyes, the remote Aleutian Islands of Alaska look barren and rocky. The waters seem frigid, the high, sweeping winds intolerable, and the seas rolling. Yet to seabirds of the northern hemisphere, these waters are idyllic, a mosaic of habitats teeming with underwater food and alive with currents of wind for soaring. Join Sophie Webb on a voyage in search of seabirds. Just as she did with her award-winning My Season with Penguins, she once again inspires our curiosity. As she watches for, writes about, and paints the graceful mottled petrel, the huge black-footed albatross, or the clownish tufted puffin, she makes tangible the delicacy yet hardiness of these seabirds—creatures that have been on the earth much longer than humans yet remain vulnerable to disturbances in the health of the ocean.
