Pekapeka: Secret Forest Bat
By Katie Furze & Ned Barraud (Scholastic)
My moko Amelie loves pekapeka – one of her most recently acquired fuzzy companions is a short-tailed bat, which some older friends find quite perplexing. Once again, the authors of Tuatara and Rūrū manage to slip a lot of information into a simple storyline – with a most restricted colour palette – supported by discrete text blocks of one or two sentences. Two pages cover background and more specific facts, and there’s a good bibliography.
Te Ngahere i te Pō/The Forest at Night
By Kiri Lightfoot & Pippa Keel Situ (A&U)
Of all the bilingual formats in print, this story’s best reflects the current vernacular. The mix of English and te reo Māori, with neither language dominating, is what you might hear in a school playground, neighbourhood café or any context where Kiwis use kupu they feel comfortable with incorporating in conversation.
Birds and animals settling down for the night against a darkening sky change guard with the night creatures, identified at first only by their eyes. As the forest’s insects and invertebrates appear, Kaitiaki Rūrū watches over emerging reptiles, spiders and frogs. In lieu of a glossary, new words are identified in the illustrations, while key words undulate in a playful font.
The Incredible Insects of Aotearoa
By Simon Pollard & Phil Sirvid (Te Papa Press)
Books about bugs don’t come much more comprehensive than this volume from the authors of Why is That Spider Dancing?: The Amazing Arachnids of Aotearoa. Though spider guys at heart, this pair wanted to share some of their favourite stories about insects (six-legged creatures rather than eight). Not just the critters themselves but the photographers and scientists who help us see more clearly these often minuscule bugs, and the habitats to which the humans travel in the course of their work – off-shore islands and mainland sanctuaries such as Wellington’s Zealandia, home to the only mainland Cook Strait giant wētā.
Wētāpunga: The biggest wētā in the world
By Jo van Dam & Laura Rayner (Bateman)
And here she is, starring in her own show, the biggest of all 11 of our giant wētā, courtesy of the guardians of Te Hauturu-o-Toi (Little Barrier) and Auckland Zoo, who nurtured breeding pairs from the island sanctuary. A wealth of facts is supported by some great photos – from life-sized to macro – and a running commentary from a couple of cute cartoon kids. For some reason, the translation of a few Māori words – “God of ugly things” (Punga) – is not given. But good on them for recording the fact that these extraordinary insects return nutrients to the soil through their “gigantic, ginormous poos; one of the biggest poos produced by an insect”.
The Living Tree: A New Zealand habitat
By Dave Gunson (Bateman)
This bugs-and-more book begins and ends with the trees that provide the habitat for Aotearoa’s insects, birds, fungi and plants, all living in and around the “complex and diverse ‘contained’ living environment” that is a single tree, as Gunson puts it. He draws on a wealth of existing information, including his own All About series as well as Andrew Crowe’s Which series.
Just one small error threw me – living in Ōkiwi Eastbourne, where kawakawa shrubs grow like weeds, it was the te reo name for New Zealand cedar: its leaf shown correctly as kawaka but, as part of an otherwise useful comparative height illustration, as kawakawa. Around here, kawakawa fall over before they get anywhere near 25m.
At Home on the Farm
By Ned Barraud (Scholastic)
Down on the farm, the way it used to be. Apart from a few signs of contemporary best practice – NAIT animal-tracing ear tags and a bull that looks much like the record-shattering Wairoa Angus of recent days – this is, as the author-illustrator has said, the farm of remembered childhood holidays, from the macrocarpa and pine shelter belts to the old windmill in the late-summer paddock.
Odder: An Otter’s Story
By Katherine Applegate & Charles Santoso (UQP)
“It’s a happy talent to know how to play,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson – and otters have that talent in abundance.
Odder, the Queen of Play in this reissued picture book by much-loved American author Katherine Applegate (The One and Only Ivan), knows that water means play – and play is an otter’s purpose in life. The story is based on the lives of two orphaned sea otters in residence at Monterey Bay Aquarium, who themselves became surrogate mums to many orphaned pups.
The cuteness of the creatures is perfectly captured by the Sydney-resident artist who also illustrated Applegate’s Wishtree.
These endangered marine mustelids play a vital role in the sustainability of the Californian coast’s kelp forests, by keeping sea urchin numbers down.
Mother of the Nation: Whina Cooper and the long walk for justice
By David Hill & Story Hemi-Morehouse (Puffin)
It’s hard to believe it’s been 50 years since that hīkoi – when a 79-year-old woman wearing a headscarf and a kiwi-feather cloak led 5000 marchers from the Far North of Aotearoa to Parliament, to deliver the message: not one more acre of Māori land.
The silhouette of the kuia and her 3-year-old moko became iconic – it’s even used at traffic lights – and the tireless fighter against oppression, who began and closed her life aged 98 in a tiny marae on the Hokianga Harbour, even had a tunnelling machine named after her.
Illustrated by a wahine Māori, this timely addition to David Hill’s picturebook biographies – out in early August – celebrates a remarkable life. And what a life – one of the many wāhine toa old girls of St Joseph’s Māori Girls’ College in Napier, she led her first protest at 18, had six children, was widowed twice and was an organiser par excellence, working for her people, and for all children.
