The Hummingbird will build her nest, The size? A ping pong ball. Secured to twigs with spider silk, This moss lined nest won't fall. Sarah Jane has created 20 luminous oil paintings depicting 10 familiar birds nesting, and put them together in Nesting Grounds. Each bird has 2 devoted paintings: The female in her nest and the nest with eggs. Additionally, the clutches in each nest increases incrementally from one to ten-the Sparrow having one egg up to the Wood Duck having ten. A 4-line verse accompanies each image describing the nesting ground unique to each bird. This artistically rendered book is ideal for artists and birders of all ages, and is a wonderful introduction to the nesting grounds of common birds. Birds featured in Nesting Grounds: Sparrow, Hummingbird, Robin, Cardinal, Plover, Goldfinch, Snow Bunting, Nuthatch, Chickadee, Wood Duck. Sarah Jane delights in her natural surroundings. She is inspired by the scenic beauty where she has lived, including her birthplace St. John's, Newfoundland. She draws immense enjoyment from watching birds visiting her back yard in Fall River, Nova Scotia. To see more of Sarah Jane's paintings, visit her website: www.sarahjaneconklin.ca

Susan Cerulean’s memoir trains a naturalist’s eye and a daughter’s heart on the lingering death of a beloved parent from dementia. At the same time, the book explores an activist’s lifelong search to be of service to the embattled natural world. During the years she cared for her father, Cerulean also volunteered as a steward of wild shorebirds along the Florida coast. Her territory was a tiny island just south of the Apalachicola bridge where she located and protected nesting shorebirds, including least terns and American oystercatchers. I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird weaves together intimate facets of adult caregiving and the consolation of nature, detailing Cerulean’s experiences of tending to both. The natural world is the “sustaining body” into which we are born. In similar ways, we face not only a crisis in numbers of people diagnosed with dementia but also the crisis of the human-caused degradation of the planet itself, a type of cultural dementia. With I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird, Cerulean reminds us of the loving, necessary toil of tending to one place, one bird, one being at a time.