Sometimes authors get ideas for their books from something right under their noses. For Roger McCord, inspiration came from under his porch. McCord, 69, of Cumberland, has a nest under his porch that has been home for some time to a family of phoebes, medium-sized, insect-eating birds.
He also spent about ten years as stay-at-home dad with his two children – a boy and girl, now grown – and so he had spent a lot of time looking at the world through his children’s eyes, while trying to help them make sense of it all. His experiences and the nest under his porch helped him conceive and create his first children’s book, “Flight of the Phoebes” (Maine Authors Publishing), which came out in December. The 28-page book follows a father and daughter as they document the 16-day nest-to-flight cycle of the Maine phoebes.
The fictional dad and his daughter, Maya, talk about the birds, nature and life. McCord, a former copy editor at the Portland Press Herald and a content producer for The Maine Monitor news website, uses his journalism background and graphic arts skill to create photo illustrations of the phoebes in action. The daughter in the story, Maya, is a composite, drawn from McCord’s observations of his own daughter, Hannah, and his two grandnieces, Bianca and Anderson.
The book includes a description of the Eastern Phoebe, belonging to the genus Sayornis, which is a fly-catching bird that often returns to the same nesting spot year after year. Maya and her dad watc.
