Feather S Flight

Read Along or Enhanced eBook: Young naturalists meet sixteen birds in this elegant introduction to the many uses of feathers. A concise main text highlights how feathers are not just for flying. More curious readers are invited to explore informative sidebars, which underscore specific ways each bird uses its feathers for a variety of practical purposes. A scrapbook design showcases life-size feather illustrations.

Welcome to an enchanted land ruled by unicorn princesses! Cressida Jenkins, a unicorn-obsessed girl who is sure that unicorns are real, is invited to visit, and readers will be thrilled to journey to the Rainbow Realm along with her! In each story, Cressida is called to help a unicorn princess and her sisters in a magical adventure. Cressida is surprised to learn that there is an eighth Unicorn Princess named Feather whose magical ruby allows her to fly! Feather is an explorer, and she's back from her latest adventure. To celebrate, she planned a super-fun sleepover for her sisters and Cressida in the Sky Castle, complete with special pajamas that will allow their wearers to fly! But Ernest the wizard lizard once again casts an errant spell that will require all of the magic of the Unicorn Princesses--and some from Cressida too--to save the day. This magical series is full of sparkle, fun, and friendship.

As heard on NPR's This American Life “Absorbing . . . Though it's non-fiction, The Feather Thief contains many of the elements of a classic thriller.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air “One of the most peculiar and memorable true-crime books ever.” —Christian Science Monitor A rollicking true-crime adventure and a captivating journey into an underground world of fanatical fly-tiers and plume peddlers, for readers of The Stranger in the Woods, The Lost City of Z, and The Orchid Thief. On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London's Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin's obsession: the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying. Once inside the museum, the champion fly-tier grabbed hundreds of bird skins—some collected 150 years earlier by a contemporary of Darwin's, Alfred Russel Wallace, who'd risked everything to gather them—and escaped into the darkness. Two years later, Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist high in a river in northern New Mexico when his fly-fishing guide told him about the heist. He was soon consumed by the strange case of the feather thief. What would possess a person to steal dead birds? Had Edwin paid the price for his crime? What became of the missing skins? In his search for answers, Johnson was catapulted into a years-long, worldwide investigation. The gripping story of a bizarre and shocking crime, and one man's relentless pursuit of justice, The Feather Thief is also a fascinating exploration of obsession, and man's destructive instinct to harvest the beauty of nature.

How do animals such as birds, insects, and bats stay in the air? The answer of course is wings and feathers. Wings and feathers are important adaptations that have taken millions of years evolve. Feathers first appeared during the time of the dinosaurs, and birds are actually distant relatives of dinosaurs. Insects with wings appeared many thousands of years before feathers appeared. This book discusses how these adaptations benefit the birds, insects, and other animals that possess them. Vibrant photographs of flying animals are paired with manageable text to make this book both educational and engaging.

The award-winning National Geographic photographer captures the stunning variety and mystery of bird feathers in this acclaimed monograph. Robert Clark’s fascinating and brilliantly colorful images reveal the beauty and myriad functions of a seemingly simple thing: the bird feather. Each exquisitely detailed close-up is paired with informative text about the utility and evolution of the feather it depicts, making this handsome marriage of art and science the ideal gift for bird lovers, natural history buffs, and photography enthusiasts. “Art meets science in a poetic celebration of Earth’s astonishing diversity. Feathers is an intensely beautiful visual taxonomy and a photographic love letter to this poetic feat of evolution.” —Brain Pickings

Over 400 photos of representative feathers from 379 species.

This book is about the many birds that visit my backyard year around. I have taken my skills in photography to capture remakable, colorful birds in their everyday habit and to share with you, the readers of this book, pictures and information about birds that may have visited your backyard. At any time of year, you can look around in your backyard and a colorful little bird will catch your eye. After watching the birds in my backyard for a few months, I decided to intentionally attract them to the backyard more often. I went to the local library and begin a research on birds. I discovered that children and adults are fascinated by birds and that millions of people in the United States paticpate in feeding wild birds. This trend is rapidly growing today. In my research I found that birds require four basic things to surive in the wild: food, water, protection from danger, and a place to raise their young safety. In nature birds fulfill these needs in a variety of ways. Birds choose their menu from the wide variety of resources that nature provides. Foods they eat in clude insects, spiders, grubs and worms, nuts and seeds, soft fruits and berries, tree sap, flower nectar, the tender young leaves and buds of grass trees, and shrubs. Birds can be resourceful in finding water: a birdbaths, rain puddles, garden hoses and streams. Birds protect their young from cats and squirrels by building nesting holes in tree trunks. They build a nest in the crotch of tree limbs or shrub branches with sticks an twigs, grass, leaves and strips of bark, string, yarn and tissue. Birds have been around at least 140 million years. 8,650 speciesof birds have been identfied in the world today.