Richard Scarry and the Busy World of Birds

Written by: Bird Collective

Published on October 22, 2026

Time to read 10 min

Bird illustrations by Richard Scarry including cardinal, egret, penguin, owl, pelican, spoonbill, woodpecker, and duck.

Birds illustrated by Richard Scarry, gathered from several of his books and arranged by Bird Collective. All RICHARD SCARRY® characters and trademarks are the intellectual property of The Richard Scarry Corporation AG. © 2026 The Richard Scarry Corporation AG

In early September, Huck Scarry would normally be back in Switzerland, watching the bird feeders around the mountain house that his father Richard and mother Patricia bought more than 50 years ago. Recently, however, it was like a scene out of his father’s 1974 children’s book, Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, a classic which Richard wrote and illustrated in that house.

“I have a new neighbor who has a huge car and had a small garage, so he destroyed the old garage and is building a new one,” Huck says. “Our two houses are attached to each other, and there’s a huge hole in the ground, and a crane, and it’s just too noisy and dusty there.”

So for now, Huck is in his house on an old mill stream outside Vienna, where he’s being kept company by birds. “This morning I was greeted by a little kingfisher who came and sat on the dining table out here,” he says, sitting in his garden. “And there are moorhens and loads of ducks.”

At his house in Gstaad, in the Swiss Alps, “We have a lot of kites,” he says. “They’re beautiful birds and they circle above the house. And up in a high mountain, there’s one bird which is very rare, and he’s called a Bearded Vulture. It’s a huge bird. They were reintroduced, and they thrive up there. If you’re lucky, you see one from time to time.”

The way Huck talks—“he’s called,” referring to the Bearded Vulture—is kind of like how his father would write, and indeed, Huck is also a writer and illustrator of children’s books. Since his father and mother died 30 years ago (Patricia also wrote children’s books, including several illustrated by Richard), Huck has managed their oeuvre, including a 50th anniversary edition of Cars and Trucks and Things That Go that includes a letter from Huck to readers.

Huck writes that his father’s books were best known for his fascination “with anything that moved, be it boats on the water, trains on tracks, planes in the air, or cars and trucks on the road.” And in fact, the first children’s book that Richard wrote and illustrated was The Great Big Car and Truck Book, published in 1951. On the title page was an illustration of Richard and Patricia in their very own small black English sports car.

But another impossible-to-miss takeaway from Richard’s dozens of books was his love of nature.

Huck was born in 1953 not long after his parents had left New York City for a cottage on a small farm in western Connecticut—like the types of farms you find in his father’s books, Huck says. There were cows in the fields, a gentle horse named Pepper who grazed on the lawn, and a chicken coop next to the house. Huck remembers that his father loved to draw the hens. A couple years later, they moved to a house on Long Island Sound.

Photo of a business card with print of a rooster smoking a pipe wand wearing overalls with text below: "Richard Scarry / Ridgefield Connecticut / Idlewood 8-6198

Richard Scarry’s business card from his Ridgefield, Connecticut years. A chicken coop beside the family’s rented cottage sparked a lifelong fondness for hens and roosters, which appear, subtly but lovingly, throughout his books. Image courtesy of Huck Scarry.

“Birds and insects and anything small always caught my father’s attention,” Huck says. “He made one of his most popular characters out of a worm. Of course, Lowly Worm has to be very careful when he goes out that he doesn’t get too close to any birds. And he made little Goldbug, and I’m sure Goldbug would be very tasty to a nice birdie if he got too close.”

Animal characters populate Richard’s famous Busytown—the likes of the Cat family, Pig family, Mistress Mouse, Dingo Dog—as he used them to teach kids about the world around them. Birds are rarely the primary characters in any book, but they make memorable appearances.

In Best Word Book Ever, published in 1963, a beach scene shows an owl in a lighthouse looking through a telescope. A sandpiper stands at the shore and a seagull perches on top of a lifeguard stand; the lifeguard is a brown bear wearing a red-and-white tank top. Later, birds illustrate the seasons of the year—in spring, a robin sings from a tree branch beside his nest; in fall, a duck flies over pumpkins and falling yellow and red leaves as a turkey drives a little red truck. Richard Scarry’s hallmarks are all there: whimsy, joy, silliness, maximalist storytelling.

In Best Storybook Ever, published in 1968, children are introduced to the heron, penguin, stork, toucan, goose, duck, puffin, eagle, parrot, kiwi, turkey, and flamingo. There’s also “birdie,” a small yellow bird whose simple name kids, and perhaps beginning birders of all ages, can happily attach to any number of candidates.

The illustrated birds are charming and recognizable. Sometimes they do the things that birds do (“The duck waddles. The goose waggles.”), but sometimes they do the things that people do. A fable about “The Fox and the Crow,” as told by Patricia Scarry, includes funny illustrations of a Red-headed Woodpecker wearing a top hat and an owl wearing a blouse. These curious details encourage exploration and learning. Children practice counting with Hooty Owl (“Hooty Owl and his mother went to the store…”), who return in a rumble-seat roadster in Cars and Trucks and Things That Go.

By anthropomorphizing birds, and all his animal characters, Richard Scarry encouraged the imagination that all children have. With animals as their guides, the outside world became to them more accessible and perhaps less scary.

“It’s difficult to open up one of my father’s classic books and not smile, if not outright laugh at some of the things that you see,” Huck says. “He had an infectious sense of humor, and in the world outside, he saw all sorts of funny things. My father noticed them, thought they were funny, and made them funny.”

“He was fascinated by just about everything,” Huck goes on. “He was a great, big, happy child. And people would sometimes jokingly ask him, ‘Richard, how old are you anyway?’ And my father wouldn’t reply, but he would just do this.” Huck spreads out one hand. “My father was a five-year-old boy. Of course, he was a responsible person and he was very successful at what he did and he was a hard worker. But in his heart, I think he was that five-year-old.”

This meant that in his books he could write directly to the young child that was being read to. For instance, “The people of Busytown have many different jobs. Is there a job you would like to have when you grow up?” Or he would use the first-person, in essence signaling that he was part of the experience with the child. “I wonder where Maniacbug is driving,” he might write, or “I see Goldbug, can you see him too?”

Says Huck: “It felt totally normal to him to address his readers that way. And one thing that he was always conscious of, which I’m also conscious of, is that children have the same intelligence as adults. The only thing that they don’t have is experience, but the actual intelligence and the capacity for learning among children is phenomenal. And of course, they pick up a lot of things much faster than adults do because their minds are so fresh and curious. A child learning a new language, for instance, doesn’t have too much trouble doing it because they just absorb it all so quickly. Whereas an adult will be concerned about getting the right tense or using the right word and making a mistake and so forth. And kids just dive into things and learn very quickly.”

SHOP THE RICHARD SCARRY® x BIRD COLLECTIVE COLLECTION

As a young boy himself, Richard was “a rather poor student” and a little unruly in class, Huck shares. “But one thing that he loved to do, he loved to draw.” Richard grew up in Boston, and his mother enrolled him in a weekend drawing class at the city’s Museum of Fine Arts. By the time he was ready to advance to college, he had decided he wanted to be an artist. But his father, who ran a department store called Scarry’s, wanted his sons to join the family business.

“And my father was not at all interested in department stores, at least running one,” Huck says. “He begged his father to go to art school. And my grandfather apparently said to him, ‘If you become an artist, you’ll grow up to live in a garret and eat spaghetti every day.’ And I was told that my father said, ‘Oh, well, that sounds rather nice. I could live in a garret and eat spaghetti every day.’”

Richard won out, and enrolled in art school at the museum. His time there, however, was cut short by the outbreak of the Second World War. He was drafted by the Army and sent to Europe. But he did not serve as a combat soldier, rather as the art director of “The Stars and Stripes,” the newspaper that was sent to troops on the frontlines. His directive was to tell them what they were fighting for and to give them news from home.

Huck believes the experience set the stage for his father’s career. “My father asked that a copy of Time magazine be sent to his desk once a week. He would go through Time and synthesize the articles, and he would write his own short articles in an easy manner, apparently. And I have a feeling that having done that for a few years, that that trained him to synthesize complicated problems like drawing the inside of a steam ship or a windmill or a coal mine and making it fun and palatable to the reader.”

Richard went to New York after the war, picking up work at Conde Nast, briefly, and for advertising agencies that worked with General Motors and Ford. Eventually, an agent of his brought Richard’s illustrations for a children’s book to a new publisher called Golden Books. Golden commissioned him to illustrate eight or nine children’s books; with those earnings, he and his young wife, Patsy, were later able to afford a multi-month tour of Europe.

They continued traveling in Europe as Huck grew up. And when he was 15, they went for good.

“One day, my father was at his desk and he said to himself, ‘For the type of work that I’m doing, I could basically live and work anywhere in the world. All I need are my papers, my paints and pencils, and the post office. I can send things off to the publisher.’ He came downstairs and announced to my mother and me that we were going to move to Europe for a year and improve our French. And we looked at each other and thought that this was a great idea.”

They moved to Lausanne, Switzerland, and Richard made his studio in a tiny apartment in the old town. At the end of the year, there was no talk of returning to the United States. They soon purchased the chalet in Gstaad that for Richard and Patricia went from weekend house to permanent residence.

It was in that house that Huck, aged 21, helped his father color Cars and Trucks and Things That Go. “My father loved to laugh and he loved to laugh at his own drawings, which was very funny.” They worked at separate tables in the same room, and began with red—fire engines, tomatoes, double-decker buses, stop signs, and on and on.

“And I asked my father, ‘Dad, why do we always have to start with red?’ And he turned to me and in all seriousness said, ‘I like red.’ I couldn't find anything wrong with that. And so that’s what we always started with. And then the next day we’d go on to yellow and the next day onto green and to blue and so forth, until the books were completely colored up.”

Richard was encouraging of Huck as his son decided to write and illustrate children’s books of his own—though for an older audience than Richard’s. “I’m so thankful to my parents that I was able to inherit a talent for drawing and a talent for writing and having an imagination,” Huck says.

Huck still helped his father color some of his books, and when his father’s eyesight began to grow worse, he helped draw them as well.

“I wince whenever I see anything from those early days of trying to assimilate my father’s drawing style,” Huck says. “But with practice, I think I’ve caught onto it. I recognize the differences all the time, but it’s always a great compliment to me when somebody thinks that what I’ve done is something that was done by my father. And it’s not just the drawing, it’s also catching his whimsy and his sense of humor, which is always a big challenge. But I just let myself go and have fun, and then I have no real problem.”

It was a lesson Huck absorbed from his father. “My father, he just thought, let’s have fun. Everything had to be fun. He once told a colleague of his, ‘If you’re not having fun at what you’re doing, you’re doing something wrong.’”