Brave Baby Hummingbird

Sy Montgomery is a naturalist, adventurer, and author of more than thirty acclaimed books of nonfiction for adults and children, including The Hummingbirds’ Gift, The Hawk’s Way, the National Book Award finalist The Soul of an Octopus, and most recently, Of Time and Turtles, which was a New York Times bestseller. The recipient of numerous honors, including lifetime achievement awards from the Humane Society and the New England Booksellers Association, she lives in New Hampshire with her husband, writer Howard Mansfield, and a border collie.Tiffany Bozic is a California artist whose work has been described as John James Audubon on acid. Her work evokes the tradition of tightly rendered nature illustration, which she explodes with playful colors and surreal sensibilities. With her ornithologist husband and school-aged daughter, Bozic spends significant time in wild places. She is the illustrator of picture books Trees and Brave Baby Hummingbird.

Two baby Allen’s hummingbirds, alone in a coin-size nest, thrive with human assistance in an informational rescue story that hints at fledglings’ fortitude. Montgomery narrates earnestly from the perspective of a male bird emerging from eggs with his sister, “the size of bumblebees.” But when the breeze that suggests their mother’s arrival stops, “We are scared, cold, and hungry.” The next morning, a human hand cradles the babies, and human lips blow from the page margin, simulating wingbeats. “I’m not a mother hummingbird, but I’ve spent ten years learning how to help orphans like you,” they are told, before moving to a Hummingbird Hotel that affords them safety to test their wings, sip nectar, and eat fruit flies until they’re ready to re-enter the wild. As they migrate south and return to their birthplace, meticulous illustrations by Bozic, crisply detailed in acrylic paint on wood, accurately depict the duo across habitats and alongside other hummingbird species. Ages 4–8. (Mar.)