The Bird and Insects' Post Office

A magpie offers a sparrow advice about abandoning the farmyard, and receives a sharp reply about its manners and appetite. Robert Bloomfield gives birds and insects their own correspondence in this children's collection of prose letters and verse. A young garden spider reports how a brood escapes a bottle by spinning webs, while a nightingale considers a wren's questions about seasonal travel. Their voices draw on the creatures' habits, turning disputes over food, shelter and freedom into conversations.

The later letters include a farmyard bird complaining about chaffinches taking barley and a fly describing narrow escapes from a human hand and a spider's web. Four contributions are credited to Bloomfield's son Charles. The author's preface explains his aim of combining amusement with natural history, and the letters carry that idea through lively exchanges. Readers interested in animal fables can enjoy the mixture of small outdoor observations, comic self-importance and everyday dangers.