Wild Wild Animals at AMNH

This Weekend I took Li'l Boo along to attend the "Wild Wild World: Awake at Night" program at the American Museum of Natural History. It was a talk about nocturnal animals led by Rob Mies the Director of the Organization for Bat Conservation at Cranbrook Insitute in Detroit. (Yes, I willingly attended a talk about bats - the things we do for our kids. ;-))

Mies led us through a slideshow featuring some facts about night time animals, and even showed us some of his appearances on talk shows like Conan O'Brien and The Ellen Show with the animals. Then he took each of the animals out to show us: a barred owl, bat, sugar glider and a two-toed sloth. While we couldn't handle the animals, he did walk around the intimate Linder Theater at the AMNH so that we could all get some up-close views of the animals. All the while Mies answered questions from the audience and told us fun facts and anecdotes about the animals. (For instance, did you know that the ground sloth in the Ice Age movies really could not have ridden on a mastadon in real life as ground sloths at the time were taller than mastadons? Did you know that sloths sleep an average of 15 hours a day?!)

In case you're wondering what a sugar glider is, it's a marsupial (has a pouch) and looks like a tiny squirrel, but with big beady eyes. It drinks the sugary sap from trees, and has extra skin/webbing between it's front and back legs to "glide" from tree to tree. It was really cute and fit in Mies' hand.

Mies was able to share these nocturnal animals that should be living in the wild with us, because they have permanent injuries and can be used in educational programs like this one.

Li'l Boo and I enjoyed the program, and I look forward to attending others at the AMNH. The next one scheduled for families is Tuesday night, February 23rd at 6:30: Family Fun-dementals II at the Hayden Planetarium. The program Tuesday focuses on using basic shapes like rectangles and circles to help children understand constellations and track them through the night sky.