By Melissa Stewart
Eleven real butterflies, and for each one what nearly wiped it out and what somebody did to bring it back.
Every spread follows the same shape, eleven times over. A big sentence runs across the top: butterflies can live and grow when we do one particular thing. Below it, Higgins Bond paints one real named species where it actually lives, the Schaus swallowtail in southern Florida, the Karner blue, Mitchell's satyr. Then a short paragraph in smaller type, tucked into a corner, tells you what happened to that butterfly. A pesticide. A drained wetland. A meadow mowed at the wrong time. Collectors. It tells you what somebody did about it, and whether it worked. A strip along the border shows the plants that butterfly can't survive without. The back has a life-cycle note and a list of things a person can actually do.
The two-layer build is the reason to own it. One text serves a five-year-old and another serves a ten-year-old on the same page, so a mixed-level group can read together and both ends of the room come away with something real. And it does a job the gentler nature books can't: eleven separate times, it names the actual mechanism of loss, with a cause and a place attached. Your child stops thinking of butterflies as endangered in some vague, sad way and starts knowing that the Karner blue needs wild lupine, the lupine needs fire, and somebody stopped the fires.