Maisie the Mountain Hare

It’s that time of year again! Time for the launch of my latest Picture Kelpies rhyming story, all about a pair of young mountain hares who live in the Cairngorms, a national park and mountain range in the Highlands of Scotland. Maisie and Archie start out as leverets, the word for a baby hare. They spend their days sleeping in a shallow depression in the heather and grasses called a form, while their mum goes foraging.

At nightfall she returns, and they wake up to feed and frolic about in the moonlight. Time passes and the seasons change. As winter approaches, their fur starts to turn white. Their best friend Thomas (a young ptarmigan) is also getting white feathers! Soon they will all be completely white, but where is the snow?

Baby mountain hares, or leverets, are brown to hide in heather and long grass.

As winter nears, their fur turns white so they can hide in the snow.

Ptarmigans are speckled brown in summer and white in winter too, like hares.

Maisie, Archie and their friend Thomas love to play hide-and-seek in the heather and tall grasses on the mountainside. During the summer and early autumn they are difficult to spot, and this keeps them safe from predators like the big golden eagle who would like to eat them!

Turning white in winter should keep them safe too, but the snow is coming later every year because of global warming and climate change. Hares and ptarmigans have not adapted to this change, so their white colouring makes them very visible against the brown autumn grasses. At the end of the story, Maisie, Archie and Thomas are so excited when the first flakes of snow start to fall. Now they can play hide-and-seek again!

Click on Maisie the Mountain Hare to see more images from the book. Available from 16 February from Floris Books in Edinburgh (and lots of other online bookshops). If you’re curious about puffins, red squirrels, wildcats or otters click HERE to see my whole range of Scottish wildlife rhyming picture books!

Greta Thunberg

Most people around the world recognise this famous young climate change activist from Sweden. When Greta Thunberg was only eight years old, she learned that the air pollution we humans create by burning fossil fuels is causing terrible damage to our planet.

Many cities are choking with coal smoke and car exhaust. In China, sometimes the air is so polluted that children have to stay indoors. All this pollution is building up in the atmosphere, and causing temperatures to rise around the world. This has brought about dramatic changes in the weather, with serious floods and hurricanes in some places, and hot, dry weather leading to terrible wildfires in others. These higher temperatures also affect the habitats of many animals, birds, sea creatures and insects. When a food source dies out because of these changes, the survival of many other creatures is at risk:

Greta was shocked by all of this information, but what she found most upsetting was the fact that no one was doing anything about it. How could people just carry on as if everything was fine? The science was clear: we would have to act now to stop climate change, or the young people of today would have no future.

In August 2018 when she was 15, Greta decided to go on strike. Every Friday she sat outside the Swedish parliament building in Stockholm with a sign: School Strike for the Climate. She handed out flyers with a list of facts about the climate crisis, explaining why she was striking. At first she was alone, but soon other climate activists shared photos and news about her online, and many more people heard her message. Other young people who cared about the future joined her Friday strikes, and in time there were marches and demonstrations happening all over the world.

Greta has been invited to speak at many international conferences, and has received awards for her environmental work. Her message is stark, and it is aimed at all politicians who have the power to make the changes that are needed. All her speeches so far have been collected in a book called No One is Too Small to Make a Difference.

Her speeches are direct and powerful. She is proud to have Asperger’s, which she describes as her superpower, because it allows her to see the simple ‘black-and-white’ of issues. She is criticised by rich white men and told she should go back to school. This is what she says to them:

“You are not mature enough to tell it like it is. Even that burden you leave to your children. But I don’t care about being popular; I care about climate justice and the living planet. We are about to sacrifice our civilization for the opportunity of a very small number of people to continue to make enormous amounts of money. We are about to sacrifice the biosphere so that rich people in countries like mine can live in luxury. But it is the sufferings of the many which pay for the luxuries of the few.”

Greta Thunberg, Unpopular, UN Climate Change Conference, Katowice, Poland, 12.12.2018

Greta is an inspiration for millions of young people, and lots of older ones too! We can’t all be dedicated climate change activists, but no one is too small to make a difference. Here are a few ideas for how we can all do something to help:

• Air travel causes huge amounts of air pollution. While it’s not easy for everyone to sail across the Atlantic like Greta, it is possible to reduce how much we fly, and think about using trains and other public transport whenever we can.

• Animal agriculture is another major cause of pollution and environmental damage. If we eat less meat, we can help the planet and improve our health at the same time.

• Mass production of plastics, electronic gadgets and clothing is clogging up our environment. This Christmas, give a gift you’ve made yourself, forget the wasteful wrapping paper, and instead of sending cards, why not give them a call?

• Importing food from across the world produces lots of pollution, since most of it has to be flown in. Try and choose foods that are grown more locally whenever possible, and remember to avoid all the plastic packaging.

• Energy companies that use renewable sources like solar, wind and tidal power are becoming more common now. In time, we should all get rid of gas boilers and petrol cars and switch to renewable electricity for all our power needs.

• What else do you think we can do?

Kenning poetry

The Old English Beowulf manuscript is believed to date from the 11th century, making it 1,000 years old.

I learned a new word today: kenning. This is an ancient Anglo-Saxon poetic device that describes an object or person in a round-about way which sometimes takes the form of a puzzle. The epic poem Beowulf is one source of these intriguing word-pairs that describe something quite simple in a clever way. For example, a ship is described as a “wave floater” while the sea is a “whale road.” The word body becomes “bone house” and a sword is a “battle light.” Each of these paired images is far more evocative than the simple noun they replace. I particularly like “battle light” as I instantly imagine the flash of sun on a metal blade.

At my Patron of Reading school, Comely Park Primary, the P2 classes have been writing kenning poems. Today Miss Lucas sent me eight of them, and I thought they were so good I wanted to share them here. Instead of telling you what they are about, I think in the true tradition of a kenning poem, you must puzzle it out for yourselves:

Have you figured it out yet? I particularly like the images of a “web dangler” and a “banana hider.” Enough to give one nightmares! Here are three more poems to give you further clues:

Clearly Mr Colvin and Miss Meyrick are not fans of this particular creature! I can quite understand, as I’m getting the jitters thinking about a “carpet crawler” and a “house scamperer“! I quite like the image of the “bath slider” too, as you can picture the helpless beastie slipping down the shiny porcelain…

I like Ava’s “web weaver” and Tegan’s dramatic “people poisoner“! I think by now you must have guessed that these kenning poems are all about a spider. I wish they had sent me some drawings to go with the poems, but instead I will provide this failed banana hider:

Comely Park Primary class P3/10 have sent me a new kenning poem they wrote together, inspired by the P2 spider poems and by a particular film trailer. See if you can guess what the film might be:

It sounds like a pretty scary film! Here’s a link to the trailer on YouTube: The BFG trailer

Did you guess?

End of Term 2016

On the last day of school, the pupils of P3/10 presented Mrs Roy with a special poem they had written for her. It’s another kenning poem and celebrates all the wonderful things she did for them during her time as Support for Learning Assistant at Comely Park Primary:

Cute baby animals

When the main character of your picture book is a baby puffin who grows up, you’ve got a bit of a problem. Skye the puffling starts as a fluffy little grey thing and ends up looking just like her parents. This gradual transformation made it tricky for the illustrator, Jon Mitchell, who had to think about the children reading the book who might not recognise Skye from beginning to end. He must have done quite a bit of puffin research:

Photo ©Saeheimar, Iceland Monitor

After the grey fluffy stage, pufflings start to grow proper feathers and the fluff falls off. This process of molting lasts some time and makes them look rather odd. Perhaps it’s no surprise Jon decided not to show Skye in this in-between phase!

Photo from http://www.Puffinpalooza.com

Before it becomes a fully-grown puffin, the ‘teenage’ puffling is a dark grey and white, and it hasn’t yet got its brightly coloured beak and feet. In time the black-and-white colouring becomes more pronounced and the oranges and blues start to appear.

Photo ©Dawn Melville (from http://www.Puffinpalooza.com)

My favourite illustration from Skye the Puffling is a sweet portrait of the teenage Skye, who is gradually turning black-and-white like her parents. Jon Mitchell used watercolours to great effect here:

Illustration ©Jon Mitchell, from Skye the Puffling.

You can see that fluffy grey pufflings look very different from their parents, and they are not unusual in that way. Lots of cute baby animals grow up with quite surprising results! Here is another baby bird who is not only a different colour from his mum and dad, but also quite a different shape:

Photo from http://www.zazzle.com

Can you guess what kind of bird he is? You might be able to tell from two clues. One is his beak, which is starting to curve like his parents’ and has a slight pink tinge. The other is the fact that he is standing on one leg. Have you figured it out?

He’s a flamingo! It will take another two or three years for his feathers to turn pink, as a result of the food he eats. His beak will continue to grow in a curve and will develop black markings at the tip. Look how much growing his little stumpy wings will have to do!

Here is another baby animal that looks quite different from his parents. He is covered in stripes and spots so as to blend in with his natural surroundings (a forest with dappled sunshine):

Photo from http://www.zooborns.com

He is much smaller than his mum and comes from Brazil in South America. Do you know what he is?

Photo from http://www.zooborns.com

He’s a tapir. When he gets bigger his stripes will disappear and he’ll turn a pale grey all over. Tapirs look a bit like pigs but are actually related to horses, donkeys and rhinos. There are several different types of tapir and some are black with a white back. A tapir like that is the star of a new children’s book called Mango & Bambang The Not a Pig by Polly Faber and illustrated by Clara Vulliamy. It looks like a lovely book and is part of a series, so Bambang the tapir has all sorts of interesting adventures!

Here is one more baby animal that looks quite different from his parents. You might be able to guess what he is by his colouring:

Photo ©Smithsonian National Zoo

He is very tiny compared to what he will be when he grows up. He will also get a lot more fur, so he won’t look like a little fuzzy pink eraser forever. He doesn’t look very fierce yet, but one day those claws will be big and scary. Can you guess what he is?

Photo ©Toronto Zoo

He’s a panda bear! Perhaps you guessed because of his little black ears and the black circles on his eyes. In this picture with his mum you can see he has grown quite a bit, but he still has a long way to go. Pandas come from China but they can be found in zoos around the world. We have two pandas in the Edinburgh Zoo that were a gift from the Chinese government. The zoo’s website has a PandaCam where you can see what the pandas are doing. You can also watch the penguins and the spider monkeys. I am writing this late at night, so when I looked it was dark and quiet. I guess everyone was sleeping!

A gift of hope for Christmas

This Christmas my family and I went to Canada. Along with the woolly jumpers and big mittens under the tree, we found some very special gifts this year. They came from Plan Canada and were not for us but for children and families in developing countries.

My daughter’s gift was for one child to have school supplies, including textbooks and pencils, and funding for school meals and teacher training. These are things we take for granted in our well-equipped schools, but without them education is impossible.

My gift was funding for an anti-bullying project which provides training for children, parents and teachers about the rights of the child. It includes “Speak out boxes” into which children can post their concerns and experiences so that issues of bullying can be discussed and dealt with. This gift was chosen specially for me because of my anti-bullying story, Pink.

My husband’s gift was clean water for families. In many  parts of the world the water is not safe to drink, and this is the most essential gift of all. These three gifts all came from the same Plan Canada Gifts of Hope website, and there are lots more amazing gifts to choose from.

The final gift for my son was a surprising one. It was a rat! Even better, a HeroRat who sniffs out landmines in fields and open spaces where war has ravaged crucial arable land. This is an initiative started by a Belgian organisation called Apopo which trains and uses rats to find land mines in former war zones in Mozambique, Cambodia, Thailand and Angola.  They can also be trained to detect tuberculosis in a lab setting, which speeds up diagnosis and saves lives.

Rats are very intelligent animals (I know because I had a pet rat as a child) and they are light enough to be able to find a land mine without setting it off. This helps prevent the terrible injuries people suffer when trying to cultivate land or collect water or herd cattle on mined fields. The Apopo rats have all got names (like Oprah, Pink and Jolie) and they look quite cute in their little harnesses. Maybe someone you know would like a HeroRat too!