Author Event: Loree Griffin Burns Joins Middle Grade Book Group to Discuss "Extreme Birdwatching"

Join us for a special meeting of Kelsey’s Middle Grade Reader Book Group. Loree Griffin Burns joins the group to discuss her newest book Extreme Birdwatching.

About the Book

In Book Two of the Discovery Chronicles, readers meet Peter and Rosemary Grant, married biologists who spent forty years studying families of finches on a small and hard-to-reach uninhabited island off the coast of South America. Their meticulous approach to understanding these birds is the stuff of legend—capturing hundreds of birds twice each year, precisely measuring their beaks, wings, and bodies, banding them, and recording all of it. As their detailed data on the finches expands, so does their understanding of how the finches came to be … and, in turn, how we ourselves came to be.

About the Author

Loree Griffin Burns is a scientist-turned-writer specializing in stories that celebrate our natural world and the people who study it. While researching her award-winning science books for children, she has beachcombed on both coasts, cruised the Pacific in search of plastic, surveyed birds in Central Park, stung herself with a honey bee, visited the wintering grounds of the monarch butterfly (on horseback!), lived on an uninhabited volcanic island in Iceland, and spent the wee hours of an entire summer of evenings studying the moths in her backyard. She is the creator, with illustrator Jamie Green, of a brand-new early chapter book series celebrating the how of science. One Long Line is out now, and Extreme Birdwatching comes out in spring 2026.