Tiny Tern Takes Flight

Vibrant prose by McKinney and delicate, meticulously rendered images by Obaldstone animate this survey of a year in an arctic tern’s life, and its migration from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back. Establishing terns’ qualities, early pages describe the birds guarding a nest against predators (“WHIZZ! ZIP! Fearless terns divebomb the mink”). Tiny Tern is a juvenile, portrayed with a partially gray body and dark beak that makes it easy to pick out in dramatic spreads of orange-beaked adults wheeling and banking in the sky. Heading for the Antarctic, the terns eat and sleep on the wing, “riding thermal air currents./ Rising on updrafts,” and pressing through storms. Once they arrive, terns find “warmth, food, almost endless days of light” as the flock dives for fish to gather strength before heading north again. In tracing a remarkable migration, this work highlights the tenacity and endurance of this small seabird, which lives across the globe “in two summers every year.” More about arctic terns concludes. Ages 4–7. (Nov.)