PAISANO, THE ROADRUNNER

With good humor and a keen eye for detail, Dewey (Finding Your Way, not reviewed, etc.) records another close encounter with denizens of the natural world—here, a family of roadrunners. It all begins when the male, later dubbed “Hamlet,” dashes up a wall near the author’s New Mexico home, scouting a nesting site—“Its stance, like its appearance, was contradictory: steady and uncertain, a cross between a cocky magpie and a nervous chicken.” Soon, Hamlet’s mate “Edith” appears, and sometime after, a quartet of chicks, one of whom, Paisano (a Southwestern cognate for “roadrunner”), takes to following Dewey around, even into the house. To the author’s own graceful, evocative drawings Meinzer and three other photographers add crisp color shots of these ungainly, bedraggled-looking birds going about the business of scratching out a living with alert efficiency. Paisano eventually finds a mate and, like his parents before him, moves on, leaving both a writer and a host of readers to be beguiled by these unique birds. (index) (Nonfiction. 8-10)