Birdscapes
By Miyoko Chu
18 pages; Chronicle Books

It's a hoot: a chirping, twittering, cawing, trilling love of a pop-up book called Birdscapes. Turn a page, and you plunge into a meticulously detailed habitat, from a Pacific seabird colony to a cypress swamp, from grasslands to Arctic tundra, each with its vociferous avian population. Reading Miyoko Chu's enlightening, atmospheric text as you admire the ingeniously engineered cutouts and listen to stereo tweets and whistles is a sensory delight.