Awesome Owls

Photo courtesy Wikipedia Commons.

Monkey is very interested in birds right now, and, not surprisingly, when we were talking about what animals he might like to learn about, he requested birds. This week, we're learning about owls. It was going to be Bald Eagles, but Monkey requested owls, so we'll go where his interest leads! We found some pretty cool resources. I picked up this book on raptors a few weeks ago at Half Price Books (love that place). This strikes me as just the sort of "living book" Charlotte Mason would have approved of whole-heartedly. The introduction had him riveted:

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Imagine you are a small animal, minding your own business, scurrying low to the ground, going about your day. Suddenly, you sense that something is watching you. You look around, but you don't see anything. Scary, isn't it?

Now imagine that whatever is hunting you has amazing powers. If you hide in the dark, it will find you, because its hearing is so good that it can hear your heart beating. Its eyes are so sharp that even when you can't see it, it can still see you. If you run, it will swoop out of the air, seizing you with talons... (page viii)

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We turned to the section about owls and he chose one: the Eastern Screech Owl. Little House in the Big Woods has a story about a screech owl that we read a few days ago, and I suspect that had something to do with why he chose this one. They're pretty interesting little birds. We also listened to their call on All About Birds, and watched a clip from the nestcam at Cornell's Lab of Ornithology. They've got a couple nest cams that are still live, one of them a Barn Owl, so I'm thinking we'll have to do Barn Owls later this week.

This was his narration for today:

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Eastern Screech-Owls don't screech at all. They look like tree-stumps, and they have glowing yellow eyes. They can see you even in you can't see them. They eat bunny rabbits and mice and frogs.

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