Author: Loree Burns

Posted on

Step Gently Out

STEP GENTLY OUT

Poem by Helen Frost

Photographs by Rick Lieder

Candlewick, 2012

Category: Nonfiction picture book (but truly for all ages)

It was the title that grabbed me first. Step Gently Out. There is an ethic in those words, and they have deep meaning for me. When the book was finally in my hands, though, it was the ant on the cover that pulled me in. He is not rendered in paints as I’d thought when I’d seen the book online, but photographed. Captured atop a slender leaf, antennae waving, stepping gently. Completely enchanting.

Would you believe that things got better from there?

Helen Frost’s text is charming, and I can tell you from personal experience that it holds up to repeated readings. Rick Lieder’s breathtaking images lend a hand, inspiring closer looks at blades of grass and silken threads both inside the book and, of course, out.

I find myself reading this one over and again. I’m in love.  I think that every child on the planet should have a copy. I plan to start with the half-dozen kids who know me as Auntie Loree …

Posted on

The Flora and Fauna of Our Place

© Loree Griffin Burns

As a science project for our homeschool year (2010-2011), my three kids and I created an inventory of all the creatures we’d documented in our suburban back yard. We scoured a decade of garden photographs and, at the same time, began spending loads of time outdoors looking for animals we had not yet recorded. At the time, we lived on a one acre property about five minutes outside Worcester, the second largest city in Massachusetts. I was SHOCKED at the diversity we found on our little patch of Earth. Talk about a year of surprising discoveries and unexpected connections!  I have been thinking and writing about it ever since.

This month, a portion of our project is on display at the Beaman Memorial Library, including the stick insect above (I’d never seen a stick insect in my life, outside the movie Ants, but when I started looking closely, they popped up regularly) and the introduction below …

In September 2010, we began to organize years of our backyard photographs as part of a science project on animal classification. We were shocked to discover that a fairly large variety of creatures from the Animal Kingdom were living under our noses. Here are a few of our findings …

 

  • Of the nine phyla in the Animal Kingdom, we photographed members of four (Chordata, Arthropoda, Annelida, and Mollusca).

 

  • Of the seven classes of animals with backbones, we recorded four (Amphibia, Reptilia, Aves, and Mammalia).

 

  • Of the ten species of frogs and toads found in Massachusetts, we saw four in our yard, and we managed to see three others around central Massachusetts.

 

We spotted an amazing variety of other animals in our one-acre West Boylston yard, including stick insects, cicadas, katydids, a clearwing moth, monarch butterflies, two species of salamander, a snake, pileated woodpeckers, a ruby-throated hummingbird, a porcupine, a groundhog, deer, and a black bear! Some of our favorite animal photographs are shown here. We hope you like looking at them … and we hope our project inspires you to look more closely at your backyard.

Posted on

Wednesday Wild: Barn Swallows

Photos © Loree Griffin Burns

 

Can you see them up there? They’re nesting in our barn and have been lovely tenants. (I am a bit worried, however, that once the babies come we will have to park our cars somewhere else.)

Anyway, our barn swallows are wishing you a Happy Fourth of July …

© Loree Griffin Burns

 

… a day filled with friends and family and finery. And a little wild, too.

Posted on

Book Giveaway Fun …

“Oh, no. No. We are not breaking a poodle out of baggage claim.“

Anna, in Kate Messner’s CAPTURE THE FLAG

While all of you Kate Messner fans were leaving enthusiastic comments on Wednesday’s giveaway post, I’ve been re-living the adventure that is CAPTURE THE FLAG with my ten-year-old daughter.  Here’s what I have to say:

Andy Starowitz, YOU ARE GOING TO LOVE THIS BOOK!

I used a random number generator to pull Andy’s name out of a virtual hat. Please contact me, Andy, at lgb (at) loreeburns (dot) com with your mailing address and I will post this to you first thing on Monday.

If you didn’t win, don’t fret! CAPTURE THE FLAG will be released on July 1 and you can order yourself a signed copy through the good folks at The Bookstore Plus.  Simple instructions for placing that order can be found right here on Kate’s blog.

Thanks for playing, everyone. Happy reading. And for those of you who found your way here through the Teachers Write! extravaganza, happy writing, too. You rock!

Posted on

Book Giveaway: Capture the Flag by Kate Messner

 

CAPTURE THE FLAG, by Kate Messner (Scholastic Press, 2012)

Category: Middle-grade Novel

 

Do you know what I loved as a kid? Nancy Drew mysteries. I devoured them, kept checklists of those I’d read and wishlists of those I needed desperately to get my mitts on. Each summer, my friend Kelley and I re-opened our private detective agency–G&G Detectives–in homage to our heroine. When business was slow, we read more Nancy Drew books. Or wrote mysteries of our own. Eventually we’d read and written so many mysteries that we had no choice but tho share them: one dog-day, on a whim, we closed G&G Detectives and opened The Garland Street Library instead. It was made up almost entirely of Nancy Drew books.

Do you know what else? If there were a way to go back and talk to eleven-year-old Loree, she’d be tickled to know that she’d one day be friends and writing partners with Kate Messner. And that Kate would create a mystery series that starred a trio of kid detectives. Little Loree would love that trio of kids as much as Not-so-Little Loree does, I’m sure of it. And she would demand Not-so-Little Loree share the love.

So, in celebration of good mysteries, good books, good friends, and the long, lazy days of summer, I’d like to send YOU an advanced copy of my friend Kate Messner’s newest mystery, CAPTURE THE FLAG. You can read a little about Kate here, and a little about the book here. If you’d like an advanced copy for yourself or for your best friend or for that neighbor kid with a detective agency, and if you live in the continental United States, just leave a comment on this post before midnight on Friday, June 22. On Saturday morning, I’ll put all the names in a hat, pull one out, and let you know who the lucky detective is.

Good luck!

Posted on

Harvard Museum of Natural History

© Loree Griffin Burns

This past Saturday was a glorious–sunny and warm with a lovely breeze all day long–and I spent the early part of it talking about citizen science at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. That’s where I met Zepur, age six, who arrived sporting ladbybug earrings and clutching her own copy of Citizen Scientists. She told me she and her dad had already begun listening for frogs near their house, and then she pulled these hand-written checklists and notes from inside the front cover of her book. It was the sort of moment that makes a writer like me giddy.

I gave my talk, including a little introduction to the Lost Ladybug Project, and then Zepur, her dad, myself, and a dozen hearty ladybugging newbies headed out into the Museum’s courtyard for a look around. We were in the middle of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I wasn’t sure what to expect. We tried to shake ladybugs out of magnolias trees and lilac bushes, but came up empty. In fact, I was gearing up to launch my “sometimes science is like this” schtick when we approached what I now call the Crabapple Tree of Happiness. There we found the mother lode of ladybug larvae, enough for everyone to have a closer look. And then, with much cheering and oohing and ahhing, we spotted one mighty fine and much-appreciated Asian multicolored ladybug.

Thank you Zepur and friends. It was fun hunting ladybugs with you!

Posted on

Saving Bees

© Loree Griffin Burns

Yesterday I submitted my research update for the paperback edition of THE HIVE DETECTIVES. Phew. But I cannot get honey bees–all bees, actually–out of my head.

According to The Plight of the Bees, a review of the CCD crisis and pollinator issues published last year in Environmental Science & Technology (volume 45, pages 34-38), there are three factors at play in bee declines: 1) bee diseases and parasites, 2) chemical contamination of flowers, nesting sites and nesting materials, and 3) insufficient food sources across the growing season.

There isn’t a whole lot you and I can do about number one, but we can do something about numbers two and three.

What, exactly?

Stop using pesticides on your garden and herbicides on your lawn.

Plant more flowers.

Think about it. And if your an over-achiever, consider helping bees by joining The Great Sunflower Project, too.

Posted on

Wednesday Wild: Yellow-bellied sapsucker

© Loree Griffin Burns

My daughter and I made our first observations for MassAudubon’s Big Barn Study yesterday. We had seen barn swallows around the yard and suspected they were living in our big, old barn. What we didn’t realize was that they were entering the barn through the garage. (These doors are closed much of the day. Should we leave the garage doors open? Will they abandon these nests if we don’t? Will we be allowed in the garage once eggs are laid?) Or that they were building nests in not-so-safe places. (Like on top of a live electrical outlet.) As usual, closer observation has piqued our interest, and we’ve got a lot to look into.

We also learned that barn swallows are very hard to capture on film. We never saw one rest or perch, and trying to follow one in flight was a dizzy-making exercise.  Luckily, we saw a lot of other birds while we were observing the swallows … including this yellow-bellied sapsucker. (We’d seen the strange holes on this tree–a European mountain ash–but weren’t sure who was responsible. Now we know.)

Favorite fact for this bird, mined from iBird Explorer North: A group of sapsuckers are collectively known as a slurp. Who knew?

Happy Wednesday!