Night Animals

We've recently enjoyed several evenings of night animal "visits". A few nights ago, we finally saw our owl and, we guess, it's young (there was an adult and a juvenile hunting together). They were so beautiful and the kids, especially, enjoyed seeing them.

We've also had fun chasing fireflies. Dh and I were commenting, as we chased bugs (all in the name of helping the kids, of course ;o) , that we'd not seen fireflies since we were kids ourselves. Are fireflies typically found in more rural location as opposed to in the city? I know that as a kid, I spent lots of time in the country at my grandparent's farm - I wonder if that's where I remember fireflies from. Hmm. . .

In addition, we got our first glimpse of the year of our bats. Two of them were out hunting mosquitoes (yay for bats!). Its fun watching them hunt. Last year, we had a close encounter with a bat - too close, in my opinion. You can read about it here.

To go along with our fun "nature studies", we've enjoyed a few Usborne Books including Night Animals. The kids always get so much out of our read aloud time when they have some practical experience with the things we are reading about. It was neat that there were pages about bats, owls and fireflies in the book and also fun websites to explore and extend the learning.