An owl is not waterproof.
That is not a small piece of trivia. The thing that makes an owl an owl, the soft fringed feather that lets it come down on a mouse without making a sound, is the same feather that soaks. A duck sheds water. An owl does not. So an owl in a river is in the one kind of trouble it cannot fly out of, and the animal that owns the night is suddenly the most helpless thing in it.
That is the book. Callie and her grandfather are out on the San Marcos River, looking at whatever the water shows them, and there is an owl in it. They get it aboard. Whether they can keep it alive is the question the book asks and I am not going to answer here.
Third in the Calpurnia Tate, Girl Vet series by Jacqueline Kelly.
The science it actually teaches
Two things, and the second one is the reason I would buy this one over the others.
The first is birds of prey, handled properly. The feathers, to start with: an owl's flight feather has a comb along its leading edge and a soft fringed trailing edge, and together they break the air up instead of letting it snap off the wing, which is where the silence comes from. Nothing about that structure sheds water. The trade is real and this book is standing on top of it.
Then the handling. If you have never had an owl in your hands you will assume the beak is the problem. It is not. The feet are. The grip is where a raptor's strength lives and where the damage comes from, and anyone who works with these birds thinks about the feet first and the face second. A child reading this book absorbs that in the middle of a rescue instead of out of a caption.
The face is worth naming too. That flat dish an owl wears is not decoration. The ring of stiff feathers around it works like a dish for sound, funneling it to the ears, which is how a bird hunts something small moving under leaves in the dark. And what goes in comes back up: an owl swallows prey whole and later coughs up a tight packed pellet of bone and fur, which is the reason owl pellets end up in so many classrooms.
The second thing is the one I did not expect, and it is why this note exists.
They are also picking up ammonites out of the riverbed. An ammonite is a sea animal. It is a coiled shell from a creature that lived in salt water, and it is lying in the ground in the middle of Texas, hundreds of miles from any ocean, because that ground was under a shallow sea a very long time ago. Nothing about the book makes a production of this. It is scenery. But a child who asks the obvious question has just walked into deep time and plate movement and the fact that the map is not permanent, and they got there from a rock in a river in a chapter book about an owl.
The child it lands with
The bird child. They exist, they are usually quiet about it, and there is almost nothing written for them at this length.
The child who wants to be a veterinarian and has already read the lambing one. This is the same job at a smaller scale and a wilder animal, and it asks a harder question, which is what you do for an animal nobody owns.
And the rock child, which is a different child entirely and the reason to consider this one even if owls are not the draw. If you have a kid who fills their pockets on every walk, the ammonite thread will do more for them than a fossil book will, because it turns up while they are not braced for a lesson.
One place to stop and talk
Skip the owl for this one. Stop where the ammonites turn up.
Ask your child how a sea animal ended up in a Texas riverbed. Let it sit. They will try distance first: a flood, a river carrying it, somebody dropping it there. Every one of those is a good scientific guess and every one of them is wrong.
The answer is that the sea used to be there. Not that the shell moved, that the ocean did. Ground that is now dry and high and inland spent a long stretch of time underwater, and the animals living in that water settled into the mud that became this rock. That is a genuinely large idea, and it fits inside a two minute conversation, in a boat, in a book you bought for the owl.
What to know going in
The book asks outright whether the owl will live, and I have not told you the answer, on purpose. Assume your child will be invested by the second chapter. If you have a child who takes animal peril hard, read ahead before you hand it over, and be in the room either way. This series does not promise that everything works out, which is most of why it is worth reading, and it is also the thing to know before bedtime.
The other caution is practical. This is a book about two people picking an injured wild bird out of the water with their hands. In real life that is a call to a licensed wildlife rehabilitator or the state wildlife office, not a job for a child, and the feet that the book teaches your child about are exactly why. Say it once. The book has already done the hard part of making them care.
Reading level runs below the store band, as it does across this series. The store tags 4 to 7. The words are easy and the ideas are not, which makes this a good one to read together with a child younger than the band and a fast independent read at the bottom of it.
Where to get it
Pulled off the Stealth Science shelf, Who Gives a Hoot? is $9.99 and third in the Girl Vet books, though it stands on its own and does not need the first two. Buy it when two different children have to share one book, because the bird child and the rock child both get fed by this one, and that is rare at this length.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
A Squirrelly Situation: When a Wild Baby Comes Home
A Squirrelly Situation by Jacqueline Kelly
Grade 4 to 7
Counting Sheep: A Birth, a Broken Wing, No Vet
Counting Sheep: Calpurnia Tate, Girl Vet by Jacqueline Kelly
Grade 4 to 7
Emi and the Rhino Scientist: How One Calf Happened
Emi and the Rhino Scientist by Mary Kay Carson
Grade 5 to 8
Browse every book we have written about by age, by kind of book and by subject: Find the right book for your child. Or see the whole Stealth Science shelf.
