Who's Home at the Hook?

Who's home when the beach looks empty?

A seal lifts its head. An osprey returns to its nest. Four tiny plover chicks hurry across the sand.

Follow one full year on Sandy Hook Bay, where every season brings someone to notice and a reason to look a little closer. Winter seals dozing on the sandbar. Horseshoe crabs coming ashore on the May full moon, older than the dinosaurs. Fiddler crabs waving in the July marsh. A monarch on the goldenrod, on its way to Mexico.

Then one morning the nest is empty - and the question becomes whether anyone is coming back.

Somebody is always home. You are, too.

A read-aloud picture book for ages 4-8, illustrated in a calm, graphic style and grounded in the real seasons of the New Jersey shore. Every animal in this book lives on this bay, in the months described. Includes a two-page field guide of all ten species, a map of where to find them, and three simple things any kid can do to be a good neighbor - starting with how to flip a stranded horseshoe crab back over in about four seconds.

From Above the Hook, Highlands, New Jersey.