FIVE NESTS (1980), Fortieth Anniversary of my First Book

Forty years ago on April 1, 1980, my first book, Five Nests, was published by E. P. Dutton. It was illustrated with beautiful art by Ruth Sanderson. For both of us, it was at the beginning of our long careers. (Ruth already had done a few books, but has since illustrated many more.) I was thrilled to become a published author but I never imagined that I would go on to write more than 100 books, and that I would still be writing and publishing books forty years later. (My new books, which will come out in 2022, will bring my total to more than 170.)
Five Nests is a nonfiction easy-read book about five species of birds, each with a different mode of parenting. With robins, both parents take care of the baby birds. With red-wing blackbirds, only the mother cares for the young. With rheas (South American relatives of the ostrich) the father bird cares for the young of multiple females. With Mexican jays, young birds help their parents care for the baby birds hatched in the following season. And, with cowbirds, the mother lays her eggs in the nests of other species and they raise the baby cowbird when it hatches.
Despite being named an Outstanding Science Trade Book by the CBC/NSTA, Five Nests went out of print quickly. It is almost impossible to find today. Two of Ruth’s beautiful black and white illustrations from the interior of the book, in the collection of the Philadelphia Free Library, can be seen on the internet. Mexican jay eggs. Mexican jays.
In 1980, the majority of children’s nonfiction were published with black and white illustrations. That has all changed, and now almost all books have beautiful full color art, like the painting on the cover of Five Nests. I have always hoped that I might one day see Five Nests republished with new full-color illustrations. The final lines of the book, There are many different ways that birds take care of their babies. Each way is a good way., apply to people too, and are just as relevant today as they were forty years ago.

Author photo on back flap of Five Nests

NEW CHICKS IN ROOM 6: A Classroom Visit

Four day old chicks. The thermometer monitors the temperature in the cage.

The children in Mrs. Best’s kindergarten class in Room 6 at Haynes School in Los Angeles have just hatched eggs, and now have five fluffy chicks cheeping in a cage in their classroom. Four of the chicks have brown markings. One is black. As the children waited for the eggs to hatch, they learned about chickens and eggs in my book Hatching Chicks in Room 6. That book follows a previous class as they went through the egg hatching process. This is a project that Mrs. Best does every year with her students.

Art projects done by the children. Some of the eggs they incubated had brown shells. Others were green.

Last week I went to visit the chicks and spend time with the children. I read some of my books and we talked about birds and eggs. I brought my ostrich egg to compare with the chicken eggs they had just hatched. The ostrich lays the largest egg of any bird. It is equivalent to two dozen chicken eggs and weighs three to five pounds! (My egg, which I bought a long time ago, has a hole in the end of the shell where the contents were taken out so it does not weigh so much.)

I learned about ostriches when I wrote about them in this book.

The incubation period for an ostrich egg is 42 days, twice a long as it takes a chicken egg to hatch.

Ostrich egg. It is the largest of all bird eggs.

The children and I also talked about birds that don’t fly, such as ostriches and penguins. Chickens can easily fly from the ground to their roosts. So, even though a lot of people think that chickens don’t fly, they do.

The chicks are already starting to grow wing feathers.

The chicks are growing fast. By the time school is out for the summer in a few weeks, the chicks will be ready to go to the henhouse, where they will finish growing up.