Meet the Howlers was just released. I was planning to put my howler sounds, recorded in Panama, up on the web. But then I found some better recordings others had already posted. The best sounds are at National Geographic. This site also has photos and a bit of information:

http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/howler-monkey.html (more…)

February marks the release of my new book, Meet the Howlers! (illustrated by Woody Miller, published by Charlesbridge).This nonfiction, rhyming read aloud looks at the life of a howler monkey from the perspective of a child who is a bit envious about the things wild howlers can get away with that a human child cannot. ”A solid read-aloud for young animal enthusiasts. Ages 4–7″ –Publishers Weekly. Charlesbridge has made a wonderful poster out of the cover art. To download it, visit their site and scroll down to the bottom of the page at www.charlesbridge.com.

I see this on the tree trunk outside my window. The animal’s name rhymes with whirl. One of its more specific common names is the traffic light color that indicates “stop.” It often sits and chews open pine cones, so it’s sometimes called “piney.” Got it? I’ll say more next month.

You guess what it is! It’s one of my favorite animals. It swims. It lives in the tropics. It eats grass.

WHAT ABOUT WOODCHUCKS?

There are plenty of people out there to love whales and pandas. But what about woodchucks? I ask you. Who loves them? 

How fuzzy wonderful do you have to be? How rare do you have to be before people notice you?  Where are the woodchuck t-shirts, bumper stickers, and earrings? 

My friend Margaret,  a librarian in Goshen, loves them.  She’s just wild about them. Out in the western U.S., people climb mountains just to see marmots. Oh, hurray, marmots! Watch them scamper up rocky slopes. Well, have you looked at a woodchuck? 

It’s a marmot. It just lives in yards, fields, and woods. 

My husband and I call them “yarmots,” a name drawn from yard marmot, our own personal term.

Come on, let’s appreciate the underappreciated. Okay, so they’ve eaten my garden a few times.  But then I built the big, big, fence suggested by Rodale, the publishers of Organic Gardening. Oh, and I grew so many other plants that the woodchucks can eat, that they don’t think of the garden. They don’t even get around to it.

These books have simple language and short sentences for beginning readers. These three books were published under the pen name, Lily Wood. (more…)