Birds

Table of Contents

	In Frank Mazzola’s Counting Is for the Birds (Charlesbridge, 1997), birds, two by two, gather at a backyard feeder, until they’re scattered by a squirrel. Kids count to 20 and back again, and learn a bit about birds from thumbnail sketches. For ages 3-7.
	Alice Melvin’s Counting Birds (Tate, 2010) is a lovely counting book with a rhyming text. Kids count to twenty, beginning with one cockerel, two lovebirds, and three flying ducks. For ages 3-7.
	Stuart J. Murphy’s Double the Ducks (HarperCollins, 2002) – a MathStart book – introduces kids to concepts of addition and multiplication when five little ducks each bring home a friend. For ages 4-8.
	Discover Birds! Changing Populations and Bird Champions are a pair of math projects using real-world data. Targeted at grades 4-6.
	How Smart Is This Bird? Find out how good pigeons are at math.

	Shirley Raye Redmond’s Pigeon Hero (Simon Spotlight, 2003) in the Ready to Read series is the true story of G.I. Joe, a World War II homing pigeon, who saved an Italian town by carrying crucial messages through enemy lines. (He was awarded a medal for bravery.) For ages 5-7.
	Leo Politi’s Song of the Swallows (J. Paul Getty Museum, 2009) is a picture-book story of the famous annual return of the swallows to the Mission San Juan Capistrano in California. For ages 5-9.
	By Stephanie Spinner, Alex the Parrot: No Ordinary Bird (Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2012) is the true story of scientist Irene Pepperberg and the amazingly intelligent Alex, an African gray parrot, who could count, name colors, and had a vocabulary of hundreds of words. For ages 8-12.
	Philip Hoose’s award-winning Moonbird (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012) is the true story of the phenomenal travels of a little shorebird known to scientists as B95 – in his lifetime, a distance of over 325,000 miles, enough to have taken him to the moon and halfway back. Illustrated with photographs and maps. For ages 10 and up.
	Read more about Moonbird here.