Publisher description:
Many children have pet parakeets. Youngsters like to watch these tiny parrots play and listen to their warbling songs. Many parakeets also learn to talk. It is fun to hear them use our words, even when they do not speak plainly.
But a parakeet is much more than a pretty pet. A parakeet is a bird. It shows what birds are and enables us to tell them from other members of the animal kingdom. A parakeet also helps us understand birds that are built differently and live in different ways. Even the ostrich, which never perches or sings and cannot fly, becomes understandable when we compare it with a parakeet.
This book used Oliver Pete, Miss Pallas' own pet, as an introduction to the world of birds. The story is told in simple words and rhythmic prose which may be read to children of four or five years and can be read by second- and third-graders. Older children will enjoy it, too, for its facts are fundamental. They have meaning for little children, but this meaning grows as the reader gains in knowledge of the world in which he lives.
Miss Pallas is a naturalist who has specialized on birds, though she has also written about insects, trees, and reptiles. Dr. Fenton, who published his first articles on birds when he was sixteen, is a well-known author and illustrator. This book contains sixty-three of his drawings. They are arranged in thirty-three illustrations that show both Oliver Pete and his ways, and the basic biology of birds.
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