The Burgess Bird Book for Children

How I Discovered This Book

I first learned about Thornton W. Burgess through the Charlotte Mason homeschooling community, particularly through Autumn Kern and The Commonplace. I learned specifically about Burgess’s four larger nature books from one of her bookshelf tours. Seeing those books made me want copies for our own home library, anticipating reading them with my daughters when they are older.

Our family’s introduction to Burgess himself came through Old Mother West Wind. That was the first Burgess book I read aloud to my girls. Each chapter is essentially a self-contained animal adventure. Burgess was a naturalist, so even though the animals become fictional characters, the stories retain characteristics of the real animals.

We enjoyed those stories so much that I began collecting many of Burgess’s animal-specific bedtime-story books. For now, those are the Burgess books we’re actually reading together. The four larger nature books are waiting until my daughters are older.

There is a documented Beatrix Potter connection, though it is a little different from how I remembered it. Burgess explained that when he began writing stories for his young son, the boy already knew Potter’s Peter Rabbit and would not accept another name for the rabbit in his father’s stories. Burgess later wrote, “When I began writing stories for my own small boy, a rabbit was already Peter and there was no changing the name.” The Library of Congress traces that history here.

How This Copy Came to the Library

I was specifically hunting for these Burgess nature books. I wanted the old hardcovers, and I particularly wanted copies with the beautiful gold lettering on the spine. I wanted that characteristic across all four books.

By August 2025, I had already begun assembling the set. I had purchased The Burgess Seashore Book for Children on eBay. At the time, it was the only copy I could find available online. Then, about a week before finding this Bird Book, I acquired a copy of The Burgess Animal Book for Children.

Then came the fun part.

In August 2025, my wife and I went on a weekend date to a local antique store. While browsing the shelves, I found all four Burgess nature books sitting together. I couldn’t believe my luck.

I grabbed all four. The individual seller wasn’t there, and in my excitement I basically marched the whole stack straight to the front desk, intending to buy them immediately.

Unfortunately, the seller knew what he had and had priced the books obnoxiously high. Since I already owned two of the four, I couldn’t justify buying the entire set again. So I reluctantly put those two back and bought the two volumes I was still missing: The Burgess Bird Book for Children and The Burgess Flower Book for Children.

I believe I paid approximately $75 for the Bird Book. I knew I was overpaying. But it was simply too much fun to find exactly the old books I had been hunting for sitting together on a shelf “in the wild.”

With those two purchases, the four-volume Burgess nature collection I had been assembling one book at a time was complete.

Why This Book Is in My Library

I’ve always loved nature, and I want to share that love with my daughters. That’s one of the things that attracts me to Burgess.

He wrote wonderfully fun animal stories and brought the animals alive as memorable characters, while retaining characteristics of the actual animals. My hope is that as my daughters become familiar with those characters through the bedtime stories, that familiarity will help spark their curiosity about the actual natural world around them.

The bedtime stories are almost an introduction. Eventually, we’ll graduate from those stories into these larger Burgess nature books.

We have not read The Burgess Bird Book for Children together yet. It’s intentionally waiting on the shelf for a few years from now. For now, we’re enjoying Old Mother West Wind and Burgess’s animal-specific bedtime-story books.

Why I Wanted This Copy

I deliberately prefer the older copies of these books.

Partly that’s because they’re simply beautiful. I love their old cloth bindings, their illustrations, and particularly the gold lettering running down their spines.

But there’s a deeper reason I like having books like these in our home. I want my daughters to grow up in a house where the things surrounding them signal that ideas, stories, craftsmanship, history, and old things worth preserving are held in high esteem.

These are some of my treasure books.

I like that an old book sitting on the shelf communicates something before anyone even opens it. Someone made and read this book more than a century ago. We’re preserving it now. Eventually I’ll take it down and read it with another generation, and perhaps someday my daughters will preserve it after me.

And frankly, these old copies are just beautiful. They really don’t make books like they used to.

Place in My Physical Library

This copy lives on the top shelf alongside the other three Burgess nature books and other antique children’s literature.

The four Burgess books are intentionally kept together as a small collection: The Burgess Bird Book for Children, The Burgess Animal Book for Children, The Burgess Flower Book for Children, and The Burgess Seashore Book for Children.

As the other three books receive their own Library records, they will become clickable Companion Volumes below.