Animals and Their Young: How Animals Produce and Care for Their Babies

Sandy Campbell is a reference librarian in the Science and Technology Library at the University of Alberta.

Pamela Hickman has written several books about animals and their
behaviours. This volume deals with animals and their young. Beginning
with hatching and birth, she covers the egg in detail and then moves on
to monotremes, marsupials, and placental mammals. Having introduced the
forms of reproduction, she looks at numbers of young, protection,
transportation, feeding, and interactions between adults and young.

While there are more than 50 species included in this book, the extent
of the information given varies widely. Hickman dedicates a full page to
koalas, but restricts information about Norway lemmings to a sentence
about their having litters of seven babies every four weeks. While
insects are included, this book focuses largely on higher-order species,
with some attention to the unusual or bizarre.

Overall, this is a fine picture book, covering the subject well.
However, animal reproduction has been frequently dealt with in the
picture-book market and is not something that changes radically over
time. There is little in this text that could not be found in other
books. The illustrations similarly cover territory frequently found in
other books. For example, similar illustrations of seahorse babies
leaving the father’s pouch and baby crocodiles in their mother’s
mouth were recently published in Maple Tree Press’s more extensive
volume Amazing Things Animals Do. So, this is not a “must buy” book
for libraries that have good collections about animals. However, for
public and school libraries seeking to build this part of their
collections, Animals and Their Young is recommended.