Ti­tle of Book: In­tro­duc­ing Birds of Trinidad and To­ba­go (Chil­dren’s Ac­tiv­i­ty Book: Ages 4+)

Au­thor’s Name: Su­cil­la Mooteer­am USA 2021

This is a com­pact and sim­ple guide to just ten of the 420-some­thing species of birds that form part of the avian habi­tat in Trinidad and To­ba­go. It’s al­so an at­trac­tive pack­age that is invit­ing young chil­dren from ages four-plus to just pull out their box of crayons and get to colour­ing all the black and white draw­ings of the se­lect­ed birds fea­tured.

Mind you, the au­thor has two aims in her book. The first is to al­low chil­dren to colour the black and white bird spec­i­mens in the three cat­e­gories which she has de­vised to or­gan­ise the ten birds which are the fo­cus of her "in­tro­duc­tion". The sec­ond aim is to pro­vide some very ba­sic but sol­id in­for­ma­tion on the birds she has al­lo­cat­ed in each part (There are three parts to the book.)

Reynold Bassant

For ex­am­ple: In Part 1 she has Birds of rivers, swamps and marsh­es. In this cat­e­go­ry, she has three birds–Green King­fish­er, Scar­let Ibis and the South­ern Lap­wing. Next, she choos­es one of the birds from this group and gives it a full-blown, well-ex­e­cut­ed, colour il­lus­tra­tion of the Green King­fish­er. She al­so gives ba­sic in­for­ma­tion such as "feeds on fish and aquat­ic in­sects." On the fac­ing page, she has the black and white draw­ing of the Green King­fish­er. This is the joy­ous chal­leng­ing mo­ment—to urge the child to colour the bird by look­ing at the op­po­site page.

This pat­tern is re­peat­ed in the oth­er two sec­tions of the book (Part 2 and Part 3). This reg­u­lar rhythm is easy to fol­low. It en­ables chil­dren to read the text and then move on to the colour­ing of the black and white draw­ings.

The au­thor spent part of her ear­ly life work­ing in the pub­lic li­brary sys­tem in Trinidad. She lat­er switched to teach­ing, re­tir­ing from the pub­lic ser­vice as a school prin­ci­pal. She was an ac­tive mem­ber of the Trinidad and To­ba­go Art So­ci­ety. This in­flu­ence is well re­vealed here­in. This ef­fort to doc­u­ment our nat­ur­al fau­na and flo­ra is a sweet break from vir­tu­al learn­ing.

"It’s trag­ic that some peo­ple ab­hor hold­ing a book. I won­der if some­one would val­ue more a vir­tu­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion of a price­less paint­ing; or the orig­i­nal?" I found this un­pre­ten­tious in­tro­duc­tion and ac­tiv­i­ty book re­fresh­ing. Like it or not, it will en­ter in­to the bib­li­o­graph­ic records to show that some­one was adding to our lit­er­ary records. The most im­por­tant thing is that chil­dren would read and colour this book. Now, on­ly if the par­ent would go out and buy it.

Ms Mooteer­am has al­ready sig­nalled the com­ing of Part 2–In­tro­duc­ing Birds of Trinidad and To­ba­go: For­est Birds. I am sure that or­nithol­o­gist James Bond would have ap­proved her move! (James Bond was a cu­ra­tor of the bird col­lec­tion of the Philadel­phia Acad­e­my of Na­tion­al Sci­ences.)

There is al­so a most use­ful glos­sary of just 30 words if you are un­sure about words such as cam­ou­flage, carotene, nestling, plumage or roost—you can brush up on your vo­cab­u­lary by vis­it­ing the glos­sary. What’s a glos­sary? Go look it up in your lex­i­con!