By Thornton W. Burgess
Peter Rabbit spends a whole spring and summer meeting the birds of the Old Orchard, and you learn every one of them right along with him.
Thornton Burgess had a clever idea back in 1919: teach children their local birds by turning bird-watching into a story. So Peter Rabbit, curious as ever, keeps bumping into new birds, Jenny Wren, Welcome Robin, Sammy Jay, Redwing the blackbird, and each one is a little character with a voice, a nest, a song, and habits Peter has to figure out. Over the course of the book you meet dozens of real North American birds, and because you met them as neighbors with names, you actually remember them when you spot one out the window. It's a chapter book to read aloud a bit at a time, one or two birds a sitting.
This is the bridge between a storybook and a field guide, and that's precisely what a nature-study group wants in the middle of the shelf. A child who won't sit for a list of facts will happily follow Peter Rabbit around, and by the end they've absorbed a real working knowledge of common birds without once feeling taught. Pairing it with a feeder or a window and a pair of binoculars turns the reading straight into looking.