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Author: Sandra Markle
Rating: Votes: 2025
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Price: RRP: $16.95 Now: $15.33
This is a delightfully warm and gentle story that weaves facts about bats into a simple story of a baby bat that loses its mother to a predator but is adopted by another mother bat. Illustrated in soft, flowing watercolors that depict such details as the mother bat folding up her tail membrane to keep the newborn "from falling down, down, down to the waiting, hungry beetles on the cave floor," young readers learn how the mother bat identifies her baby by its sound and smell and also how the mother needs to eat nearly her weight in insects every night so she can nurse her infant. It is during one of those nighttime forays that the mother bat is snatched out of the air by an owl. It is certainly a sad, albeit natural, occurrence between predator and prey, but the illustrations are not gruesome or scary. After a few frightening moments, the motherless baby and a childless mother are wrapped around each other. This would be an excellent read-aloud either for families ready to discuss birth and death among animals or classes learning about mammals, habitats, and animal ecology. Ages 4 to 8.
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