Adventures at Wilder Farm

(Written by Dave) We just received a shipment of F&Gs for Lita’s next book—Strange Creatures: The Story of Walter Rothschild and his Museum. This book is with Disney-Hyperion Books and is scheduled for release on Feb 1st, 2011.

Here’s a short description of Walter’s story:

Walter was born in 1868 and was the son of Lady Emma and Lord Nathan Rothschild. The Rothschilds were a family of bankers and Walter was expected to someday take over the bank. But Walter wasn’t interested in the bank. Instead, he loved every creature that crawled, slithered or flew. He began collecting bugs and butterflies at the age of seven. The family also knew explorers who traveled the world to bring back animals for the London Zoo, and soon Walter started collecting more exotic creatures like kangaroos and kiwis. From there his collection grew and grew, until it threatened to take over the Rothschild estate. Lord Rothschild eventually lost patience with Walter’s hobby and insisted that Walter become a banker, like everyone else in the family. Reluctantly, Walter obeyed, but his dream couldn’t be dimmed.

Eventually Walter created the largest zoological collection gathered by one man and was respected throughout the world for his contribution to science. He wrote 1200 books and scientific papers and named 5000 new species. Animals that now bear the name Rothschild include butterflies, fish, a millipede, a fly, a lizard, a porcupine, a wallaby, a bird of paradise, and even a giraffe. The painfully shy boy who never made a good banker forever changed our understanding of the world’s diversity of creatures.

Lita actually has a strange connection to Walter. Lita’s grandparents, Fran and Frederick Hamerstrom, were ornithologists who cared for birds of prey. One of their scientific mentors was Ernst Mayr, who began his career on an expedition collecting for Walter Rothschild. Later he became curator of Rothschild’s collection of birds, now housed in New York’s American Museum of Natural History.

The picture above is Ernst Mayr with Sario, one of his Malay assistants, in the former Dutch New Guinea in June 1928. The picture below is Lita at Walter Rothschild’s Tring Museum in June 2009.

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Lita’s last event of the 2009-2010 school visit season was on May 19th, and on the 21st we took off for a vacation in England and Scotland. We flew into Edinburgh and drove down to the Lake District (about 3 hours) where we had rented a lovely cottage near the village of Hawkshead. The cottage was built in the 1600s and was just above the village.

Also just above the village, through the sheep pastures on the path of our walk into Hawkshead, sits a beautiful old 17th Century church.

Hawkshead is the home of The Beatrix Potter Gallery, which is in a building that was once the office of the local solicitor William Heelis, who married Beatrix in 1913. They lived at Castle Farm in Near Sawrey, a couple of miles down the road. Beatrix’s Hill Top Farm is also open to the public and is a fun place to visit.

The main activity in the Lake District is walking. One of our favorite hikes is in the Borrowdale Valley.

And another beautiful walk is in Grasmere, the home of William Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage.

We ended up in Edinburgh — here just below Edinburgh Castle — and the weather turned dark and stormy…

The other main activity in England and Scotland is visiting pubs. Up near Edinburgh Castle we found a pub called The Jolly Judge, a good place for a pint of beer and a cup of soup!

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We’re so excited that the release date for Born to be Giants has arrived, so we’re rolling out our new Born to be Giants mini-website!

Lita has produced an expanded group of dinosaur coloring pages (download them from here) , based on the images in Born to be Giants and her earlier D is for Dinosaur.

And we have some pages that show the sketch to painting process for this book, and some pictures from Lita’s first dinosaur dig with the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology.

Here are some snippets from the reviews for Born to be Giants:

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(Written by Dave) It was a humid 85° three days ago in New Hampshire, but last week Lita visited schools and libraries in Berlin, Gorham and Randolph, New Hampshire, and it snowed several inches — on April 28th! I haven’t been up that way for several years so I decided to come along.

On April 27th, Lita’s new book Born to be Giants was released, and she signed a few copies at the White Mountain Cafe and Bookstore in Gorham. Below is a picture of Lita with the first book store copy sold.

The community was so welcoming — there were signs for Lita all over:

The kids at Berlin Junior High School made a fantastic poetry circle, with poems written on the foot tracings, that emphasized what it’s like to be in other people’s shoes around the world. It was really well done!

This was Lita’s last group of March and April school visits. She did more than 40 presentations during the last three weeks of April. Here she’s in the Library at Berlin Junior High School.

And at the the Randolph Public Library — shown a beautiful drawing of a turtle.

Everything was wonderfully organized by Yvonne Jenkins, a super librarian at Berlin Junior High School and at the Randolph Public Library, and by Ingrid Graff, another super librarian at the Edward Fenn Elementary School in Gorham. Thanks Yvonne, thanks Ingrid! And thanks to all the librarians who organized Lita’s school visits this year, it was a great season!

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Pennies for Elephants is a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award!

You can download the full list of finalists — books in Children’s/Young Adult Lit here.

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We have a spindly tree on the way to our front door that seems to mysteriously get decorated when we leave the house, most recently with a Bird Talk theme!

This isn’t the first time. Even before the tree was in the ground we came home one afternoon to find some strange objects on it.

Hmmmm. It all looks strangely similar to our friend Kim Cunningham’s found object art.

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