Colour for curlews by Renee Treml

Random House, 2013. ISBN 9781 74275 921 0.
(Age: 4+) Recommended. Picture book. Australian birds. Colour. Two curlews take paint and an artist's paint brush and proceed to use the colours in unexpected ways. With tubes of paint tucked under their wings, they paint each other's eyes with yellow. The bowerbird spies the tube of blue and paints himself with the colour he so admires. The brolga grabs the red, the quails the red and yellow and make orange the lorikeet the yellow and blue to make green, while the doves mash many colours together to make purple. Each set of birds grabs a different colour to adorn themselves with and some use two colours to make another. In the end the wombat rolls around in a maze of colours making brown, his favourite colour and he goes to sleep.
Told in verse form, the rhymes and rhythms of the words will keep children and parents reading, as the story of the birds and the colours mixes to a absorbing story of colour. Readers will love to read of the variety of Australian birds and one animal, and the colours they already are, comparing them with the colour they attach to themselves after taking the paintbox. Various bird prints splash across the pages as they tramp in the different colours. For a book extolling the variety of colours and their names, along with information at the end of the book about the birds presented, this will be a well used addition to the class or home library.
Fran Knight