Nature Study Books for Children Free Online: 12 Living Books About Real Animals
There is a particular kind of children's book that has almost stopped being written: a story about animals in which the animals behave the way the actual species behaves. Not a fable with a fox in it, and not a facts-and-photographs book either, but a narrative whose plot depends on what a beaver really does in October.
The genre had a name — nature study — and a forty-year golden age either side of 1900. It is the reason a certain kind of adult can identify a bird by its call and cannot remember learning how. Charlotte Mason called books like these "living books" and built a curriculum around the idea that a child should meet a subject through good prose before meeting it through a textbook, which is still the best argument for them.
Twelve are free to read in the library. They divide by how much story is carrying the natural history.
Story first, natural history smuggled in
This is the shelf for a child under eight, and Thornton Burgess is the whole tradition's best practitioner.
- Old Mother West Wind — the first one, sixteen very short chapters. Burgess's rule was that no story could contain a false fact about an animal, and he kept it across roughly 170 books.
- The Adventures of Reddy Fox — one animal, one volume, twenty-odd short chapters. A child finishes this knowing what a fox eats, how it hunts, and why it is afraid of a dog.
- The Adventures of Johnny Chuck — a woodchuck, hibernation, and burrow architecture, wrapped around a story about leaving home.
If those land, Thornton Burgess books in order has the other seventeen volumes that are here.
The animal biography
Ernest Thompson Seton invented something genuinely new: the life story of one wild individual, told without sentimentality and usually ending in that animal's death. He was attacked for it at the time — Theodore Roosevelt called the school "nature fakers" — and the criticism was half fair and half missing the point.
- The Biography of a Grizzly — Wahb's whole life, from orphaned cub to old bear choosing where to die. It is a serious book and it will upset a sensitive nine-year-old, which is part of what it is for.
- Woodland Tales — Seton in teaching mode instead: short pieces, things to go outside and look for, and a running insistence that the reader do so.
- The Call of the Wild — the same form pushed into literature. London's dog is closely observed and the book is about something else entirely; read it at eleven or twelve, not at eight.
Nature study proper
Books whose organising principle is the subject rather than the plot, but which are still written rather than compiled.
- Bird Stories — Edith Patch, an entomologist who wrote for children without condescending, and the best introduction here for a child who has started noticing birds. Each chapter is one species and one thing it does.
- Chatterbox Stories of Natural History — Victorian, anonymous, mixed verse and prose, and a good demonstration of the era's cheerful assumption that children want to know how things work.
- Adventures of a Young Naturalist — Lucien Biart, collecting in Mexico. This is a travel book as much as a nature book, and the Mexican material is genuinely unusual in English-language children's writing of the period.
- Rollo's Museum — Jacob Abbott, 1839, and the earliest thing on this list. Rollo makes a collection, which is the actual activity nature study is trying to provoke; the book is a set of instructions disguised as a story.
Adventure with real field observation underneath
R. M. Ballantyne wrote adventure novels, but he had worked for the Hudson's Bay Company and had seen the places, so the natural history is first-hand in a way his imitators' never was.
- The Coral Island — the Pacific reef material is closely observed and the book was Golding's direct target in Lord of the Flies.
- The World of Ice — Arctic whaling, and the best writing about ice for a young reader that I know of.
- Ungava — sub-Arctic Quebec, fur trade, and the most ethnographically careful of the three, though the period's attitudes are on full display and want discussing.
How to actually use them
The tradition's own advice was that the book comes second. Read a chapter about a woodchuck, then go and find a burrow; the book's job is to tell a child what to look at, and it fails if nobody goes outside. Charlotte Mason's version was a nature notebook — the child draws what they saw, badly, weekly — and the drawing is what converts reading into noticing.
One honest caveat about the whole shelf: the science is a century old. The natural history holds up remarkably well, because these writers were describing behaviour they had watched. The taxonomy, the ecology and above all the attitudes to hunting and to indigenous people do not, and a modern reader should expect to stop and talk about a paragraph now and then.
For the fiction end of the same interest, classic books for kids free online is the broader shelf, and animal stories for children collects everything here with a creature in it.