Parrots Over Puerto Rico

For my Sibert Award winning book I read "Parrots over Puerto Rico" by Susan L. Roth and Cindy Trumbore. The book gives a brief history of the island of Puerto Rico as well as some overview of the climate and geography and talks about the indigenous parrot population there. The book details how for a long time the people there lived with the parrots without disturbing them but eventually began destroying their habitat with logging and deforestation. The parrot population at one point was near complete extinction, at one point only 24 remained in the wild. The book covers the efforts by scientists to save the parrot population by forming the Puerto Rican Parrot Recovery Program, setting up conservation areas in the wild, and breeding the birds in captivity. Today there are now hundreds of the parrots between those in captivity and those in the wild. The book is also full of extremely vivid collage style illustrations to accompany the informational story telling. I thought this book was very interesting as its one of the few non-fiction children's picture books that I found. I think its a very interesting issue and I think that conservation of nature is something that isn't talked about enough to young people and this book does a very good job of making this issue apparent and understandable for readers. I thought the illustrations, while maintaining creativity and staying interesting, also did a very good job at accompanying the text and giving visual aids that helped to make the story a bit easier to picture along with being very vivid and beautiful. I think the illustrations were my personal favorite part of the book and really stood out to me for some reason. I also really enjoyed reading a book about environmental conservation as it s something that I'm pretty passionate about. Overall I think this book is really well done. It portrays very relevant information while staying interesting and entertaining but not to the point that anything is unclear or muddled.