e on the prairie including stories of birds of the grasslands (bobolink, prairie chicken, and bobwhite), as well as mammals that live in their midst (pocket gopher, prairie mole, cottontail rabbit, spotted skunk, white-footed mouse, and prairie squirrel) and insects that flit about (locusts, grasshoppers, walking sticks, and monarch butterflies). But the prairie also has groves of trees where fox squirrels scamper along branches and barred owls and red-tailed hawks perch in the tree-tops looking for prey. And dotted throughout the landscape are ponds and marshes where muskrats, killdeer, and red-winged blackbirds can be found. Through well-illustrated stories that follow each of these through the course of a year, the reader becomes familiar with the life of the prairie in a delightful way.