Hutchcraft: B Is For Bufflehead

It’s been a great year for bird books, and as I look back on it, I surprise myself by counting among my favorites a title intended in the first instance for hands too tiny to lift binoculars.

As its title and its layout make clear, Steve Hutchcraft’s B Is For Bufflehead is an “alphabet book”–a stunningly illustrated alphabet book–for the youngest not-yet-readers. But there’s much more to this book than that title and that layout might suggest. As the author and photographer’s afterword points out, Bufflehead was carefully designed for the changing needs of children as they pass from pre-school innocence to information-hungry adolescence; the result is a book whose multiple layers can be plumbed with pleasure even by adults.

With a couple of exceptions, each letter of the alphabet is illustrated by spectacular photos of two bird species, one for the upper case, one for the lower; in a couple of instances, two photos of the same species serve, while “W”–for wren and for warbler–is graced with photos of half a dozen parulids and four troglodytids. All but a couple of the photographs ( including that of Red-faced Warbler, unfortunately) are of the first quality, many of them showing the birds in engagingly outlandish poses or doing interesting things. I particularly like Hutchcraft’s fondness for the unexpected: sure, D is for Duck, but K is for Kiskadee and X is for Xantus’s Murrelet–two birds I can’t recall ever having seen in a children’s book, and both of them the more welcome for it.

Each photo is accompanied by a short text; these snippets of prose are in the first person, as if spoken by the bird itself. More often than not, these soliloquies mention a notable behavior for the reader to look out for, and in one case–that of the Yellow-billed Magpie–the bird laments its own conservation status. Thankfully, Hutchcraft is able to avoid the cloying and the cute in these passages, though there are occasional breaches of diction: the Caracara claims that it can “dominate my competitors at every feeding frenzy,” while the Yellow-billed Cuckoo on the facing page observes that caterpillars are “yummy, yummy in my tummy.” I feel honor-bound, too, to defend the Zone-tailed Hawk from the Turkey Vulture’s accusation of “meanness.”

The fifty-two pages of alphabet birds are followed by two openings of quiz photos, including eight images of chicks and nestlings that are sure to appeal to the book’s youngest audience. There follows a brief encyclopedia describing the range, habitat, and food habits of each of the species included in the book, along with two or three “fun feathered facts” for each. These pages are incredibly rich in information, just the sort of stuff that a bright older child (or an adult new to birding) will devour and digest. A very nice touch is the inclusion of the locality at which each photo was taken.

There are a couple of instances in these last pages where a small error or minor unclarity creeps in. It’s not true that female Wood Ducks “do all the courting,” and though I suppose a Bald Eagle could “dive at over 100 mph,” I very much doubt that one has ever bothered. Xantus’s Murrelet, scarce as it is, is far from the “rarest of all seabirds.” I’m intrigued by the idea that “thinner” Black-crested Titmouses are dominant over “fatter” individuals in flocks.

These are niggles and quibbles, and none of them (and none of the few minor typos scattered through the book) should keep those of us with young friends from putting this book in their hands. And who knows, maybe next year those hands will be raising a pair of binoculars to look at the birds of their neighborhood.