26th September International Rabbit Day

International Rabbit Day is celebrated on the  fourth Saturday of September each year. This day promotes the protection and welfare of both domestic and wild rabbits. Rabbits are considered pests in Australia as they have done so much damage to indigenous fauna's habitats, but it is nice to see that they do have a day of their own that has nothing to do with Easter. There are some wonderful books worth sharing too because books like these do not have a rush on borrowing at Easter. Where the rabbit in a story is not a toy, it is often adventurous just like Peter Rabbit in Beatrix Potter's classic.

See 

• The Wonderful Habits of Rabbits  by Douglas Florian and Sonia Sanchez. This is one long poem that begins

 ' The habits of rabbits are many, not few,

 with plenty of things that they love to do!'

• The Rabbit Problem  by Emily Gravett. This beautiful book follows a pair of rabbits through the year as they cope with their ever expanding brood. It is also a good introduction to Fibonacci and his number sequence!

• All Because of Jackson by Dick King Smith. Jackson, a rabbit wants to see the world so he stows away on a ship hoping to have adventures. This is just the way rabbits came to be in Australia!

• Tom Crean's Rabbit  by  Meredith Hooper and Bert Kitchen.  This is a true story about a rabbit that went to Antarctica with the Scott expedition!

• The Great Rabbit Chase by Freya Blackwood. This is the story of a mother and daughter who chase their escaped rabbit through the streets of town. Mum is wrapped in towel! Kindergarten love this story.

• One Runaway Rabbit  by David Metzenthen and Mairead Murphy. This too is a chase, but this time a fox is chasing the rabbit.

• The Black Rabbit by Philippa Leathers. This time a rabbit is trying to escape from the 'big black rabbit'. Children love to be in 'on the secret' when you read books like this where the big black rabbit is in fact a shadow.

31st December Pangolins

I'm on holidays and enjoying having time to read all sorts of things I don't usually have time for like the newspaper. Today in the Sydney Morning Herald (page18 in an article by Lindsay Murdoch), I read something alarming about pangolins, an animal I first met in a wonderful picture book by Bert Kitchen called Tenrec's Twigs. This story is set in Madagascar and has an amazing array of obscure animals, supposedly native to there. A friend visited Madagascar recently and I told her to be sure to see a tenrec and a pangolin. Well she saw a tenrec, but not the pangolin. And reading this today I wonder if that is why.
" Among the environmentalists' biggest concerns in South-east Asia is the pangolin, a scaly aardvark-like mammal that is the inspiration for Pokemon's Sandlash, a character adept at battling foes. The real-life ant-eating and nocturnal pangolins have the dubious distinction of being the most poached animal on Earth...More than 100,000 of the shy and near-sighted animals are captured every year across Africa and Asia."




The UN's Convention on International Trade and Endangered Species (CITES) has banned global trade in pangolins in the hope that they do not become extinct, a good reason too, to ensure that the students we teach know about them. I bought these two books for the library, so that when I share Tenrec's Twigs I can offer the children more to read. Not a lot, but a start without having to look through an index in a general animal  nonfiction book.

24th April Bert Kitchen (1940)

Last year on this date I celebrated three birthdays, Evaline Ness, Dorothy Butler and Margaret Wild, but subsequently I have learned that today is also English illustrator Bert Kitchen's birthday and I have to tell you about one of my all time favourite books, Tenrec's Twigs. This story set in Madagascar is about a tenrec, a real animal, but one I had never heard of, who builds these amazing structures from twigs. Along the way he chats to other animals, native to Madagascar, such as a pangolin, a giraffe and a sloth. The animal illustrations are meticulous, accurate and so appealing that I want to linger on each. The story has interesting themes, in creativity and purposefulness and allows for plenty of discussion and debate as well as introducing readers to animals, their habitat and distinctive characteristics. Bert Kitchen seems to specialise in animal illustrations and even the books in my library that are not factual, such as his Ugly Duckling and The Lion and the Mouse and Other Aesop Fables are still predominantly illustrated with animals.