Speaking Volumes

There are weeks where Friday rolls around and I am frantically trying to come up with something interesting to blog about. Not this week. This week has been exciting, we got tickets to the school play ( Willy Wonka Jr. - get yours today), I went to the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art for the first time, and we had owls at the library last night!

First of all- I LOVED the Eric Carle museum, and I sat in on a talk about the art of Virginia Lee Burton (Mike Mulligan and the Steam Shovel), and heard some really interesting stories about her life and her work. I was sure I was going to blog about all that today.

That is until the owls came.

The program last night was called “Owl Prowl.” Kim Hargrave came to us from the Denison Pequotespos Nature Center in Mystic, and she did a fantastic job teaching us about the owls of Connecticut (there are 8 different kinds), and she brought three owls from the Center along with her. She played owl calls and told us all the different characteristics of owls, how and what they hunt, and why some are endangered in CT. The kids were mesmerized and many seemed to be mini owl experts themselves...able to answer Kim's questions to the audience correctly!

She brought a screech owl who lived at the center because he had been hit by a car and was blind:

A saw-whet owl (my favorite), who also had been hit by a car and could not fly enough to hunt on its own:

And a big barred owl named Tommy, who only had one wing: 

Then all the kids got their own owl pellets to dissect.

Lovely!

I love owls! There are tons of owls featured in children's books. Here are some, new and old, that you can find in our collection: