Birds of Aotearoa New Zealand: Collective Nouns, Ngā Manu o Aotearoa: Nga Kupuingoa Topu
Melissa Boardman
HarperCollins Publishers
Pub: 2020

June 01, 2021

If you love native New Zealand birds, Birds of Aotearoa New Zealand: Collective Nouns by Melissa Boardman is the perfect book for you. It features all our birds and includes their names in English and te reo Māori.

It also has 115 pages of fantastic illustrations of all the birds. Every bird has a page to themselves and sometimes two. Also included is each bird’s habitat and all the nature surrounding them.

The book features 50 pages with many facts about the birds and their habitats and whether they are extinct or alive. Each page has a coloured dot at the top left which means: green – not threatened. Blue – at risk. Orange – threatened nationally. Red – threatened nationally, endangered. Black – threatened and nationally critical.

Every colour has at least ten native birds apart from black which is ‘nationally critical’ or on the border of extinction, and there are 20 birds under that colour.

Apart from all the endangered species, each bird gets a part of the book that talks about their personality, what they eat, where they can be found, and what their habitat is like. The author writes about how high pitched their song is to other birds, why they are going extinct and what they have for meals every day. Boardman also writes about why they are endangered, what their predators are and what else might be causing their death and extinction.

Birds of Aotearoa New Zealand also includes collective nouns for the birds. At the beginning it gives you more information about what to expect from the pages, and it also includes background perspective of why the illustrator created this book, and her background.

This is an amazing book recommended for bird lovers of all ages. The illustrations are unbelievable.

• Isabelle Woods is 12 and lives in Christchurch.