Owl Puke

Kids love science-especially when it's hands-on-and kids love yucky stuff. The Owl Puke Book and Owl Pellet brings the best of those two worlds together in a unique package that follows directly in the tradition of The Bug Book & Bug Bottle and The Bones Book & Skeleton (which together have 3.3 million copies in print). What is an owl pellet? It's the football-shaped object regurgitated twice a day by owls, which contains the skeleton of at least one owl meal, be it a mouse, vole, shrew, or small bird. Used in elementary schools to teach the food web--but virtually unavailable at retail--a professionally collected, heat-sterilized owl pellet is now married to a lively, two-color illustrated book filled with facts and related activities about these most amazing birds. And what a story the Owl Puke Book tells--of the food chain, animal anatomy, life in the forest; of a bird that could read the bottom line of an eye chart from one mile away; and of a fierce hunter that swallows its prey headfirst and digests everything but the bones, which it spits back up in a pellet. As for the story the pellet tells, kids need only a toothpick to find out. The package includes a tray to hold the bones and a chart to help identify the pellet's contents.

It's a hoot.