Mother Penny, the mallard duck, was a good mother to her brood of ten little ducklings that, like so many little puffs of eiderdown, ran whistling and tumbling after her into the cove which was their home up on the Maine coast. Then out of the storm one day came "the littlest whistler," a lost baby mallard, tossed up by the storm.

Mother Penny never hesitated; she adopted him and it is doubted that a single one of his foster brothers and sisters ever knew the difference! Little whistler had some harrowing adventures, some of them amusing, some almost tragic, but all of them so authentic, so completely true to the life of the mallard living along the Atlantic coast, that to read them is to dip into very interesting natural history. Miss Robinson spends her summers on Orrs Island where she studies bird life at close range, and her stories are a treat to anyone, regardless of age, who is even mildly interested in our North American birds. An ideal book, this, for the child who is just beginning his nature studies at school. And charmingly illustrated.

From the dust jacket