A Nest Is Noisy

Dianna Hutts Aston and Sylvia Long's A Nest Is Noisy is a nature book for 6 year olds about all the different ways an animal builds somewhere safe to put its eggs.

What happens

It isn't only birds. That's the first surprise and the book runs with it.

Orangutans go up into the rainforest canopy and braid a fresh bed of branches every single day, with a mattress of leaves. On wet nights they weave a leaf umbrella over the top.

Wasps scrape fibres off weathered wood and chew them into a paste that dries hard, which is genuinely how paper works.

Cave swiftlets build their nests entirely out of spit. The male swings his head side to side and the strands harden in the air into a lacy bowl.

African grey tree frogs whip up a foam over the water that sets in the sun like a meringue crust. When the tadpoles are ready the whole thing falls apart and drops them in.

The biggest nest here is a mound of rotting leaves more than eleven metres across. The smallest is the bee hummingbird's, the size of a golf ball, made of moss and lichen and wrapped in spider silk so it can stretch as the chicks grow.

That last fact is the sort of thing your reader will tell you about at teatime for a week.

It's short. Each entry gives you one creature and a proper paragraph about it, with real measurements in both metric and imperial, and no talking down.

There's a lot of good ugly detail too. Lampreys shove pebbles about with their suction-cup mouths. Army ants clip themselves together by the legs into a living ball with the queen inside. An alligator's eggs become male or female depending on how warm the nest is.

A couple of moments are a bit bracing for the youngest end. Predators are explained plainly, as animals that eat other animals. And the paradise kingfisher smashes into a termite mound beak-first to make its hole, "sometimes dying on impact", which the book says cheerfully in brackets.

For a child who asks how things work rather than what happens next, this is exactly the shape of book they want. It's also easy to read one entry and stop, which not all nonfiction manages.

What to read next

The Brilliant Deep is in the library too, for a reader who liked the building. It follows a man in Florida who worked out how to grow new coral and put reefs back, and it starts with one tiny spawning coral drifting until it finds somewhere to settle.