Night Flyer: Zipping, Zapping, Zooming Bats by Ann Earle

October is the month for bats--real or imagined or hung decoratively from the ceilings or taped to the windows of homes and schools all over. For basic information on bats, especially the popular little brown bat, the noted Let's-Read-and-Find-Out series has a high-flying entry in the nonfiction division.

Zipping, Zapping, Zooming Bats (Let's-Read-and-Find-Out Science 2) features eye-catching acrylic and colored pencil illustrations by the esteemed Henry Cole, an easy-to-read text, and excellent back matter to back up its information. Concentrating initially upon the habits and behavior of the brown bat, Earle describes the complex, five-fingered bat wing, the bat's ability to navigate by echolocation, and its voracious appetite for insects, eating half its weight in night-flying insects such as mosquitoes in a single night.

Earle also takes us into the bats' nursery, where little bats are born, nursed, groomed, and kept warm inside their mothers' folded wings. The author dispels bat superstitions and briefly describes common species such as the hog-nosed, leaf-nosed, and gray bats, even devoting a couple of pages to the Flying Fox, the largest of the bat family. Earle discusses endangered bats and even provides directions for homemade bat houses to provide needed habitat for these fascinating animals.

Other excellent nonfiction sources are Lily Woods' Bats (Scholastic Science Readers, Level 1), Bats - Creatures of the Night (All Aboard Reading: Level 2: Grades 1-3), and Gail Gibbons' charmingly illustrated Bats.