Bug Zoo

BBug Zoo
Published at DK Canada

About the Book

A guide to building your very own zoo of bugs, worms, and other creepy-crawlies! Written by Discovery Channel's Nick Baker, Bug Zoo shows children how to turn backyard bugs into fascinating pets and create a "zoo" of insects, spiders, worms, and other common creepy-crawlies. Learn to build an ant farm, spider house, bee box, wormery, and more!

My Thoughts

Bug Zoo is definitively a great book to include in your exploration of nature.  The book is packed with interesting idea of how to observe close and personal a world that if often disregarded by many.

The book starts with a presentation of the tools you will need to examine and study the bugs you will encounter.  It even gives you a step-by-step process to make your own container to catch and keep bugs!

The bugs, or should I say the creatures, presented in this book are the wood lice, slugs, snails, aphids, caterpillars, worms, earwigs (shiver – I dislike those ones), ladybugs (my favourite!), spiders, crickets, katylids, pseudoscorpions, mosquito larvae, dragonfly larvae, and backswimmers.   As you can see there is many creatures you can catch and observe during the warmer season.  

For each creature, the book will present it’s different parts as well as give information about it.   Then you will get ideas on how to build a temporary house to give you opportunities to observe the ones  you have caught.    For example, when the snail is presented you get a suggestion on how to get the radula – their special tongue – in action.    You will also learn interesting facts about the creatures.   Apparently a garden snail can smell food from 50 cm away.   To test this, the book is suggesting some ways to test their sense of smell.

As we are packing for a extended camping trip, this book is placed securely in the nature study bucket as I want us to explore our surroundings.    We have all the books and tools we need to learn more about nature.    This book will give a new dimension of our studies as we will be able to observe on numerous days the life of creatures we encounter regularly while being in the woods or even our garden.

Bug Zoo is a great way to let you kids learn about creatures found in nature.   I would suggest it to anyone wanting to observe them and learn at the same time.

Bug Zoo is available at your favourite bookstore, even amazon.ca.

Disclaimer: Thanks to DK Canada for sending me the above mentioned product for review purposes. I was not monetarily compensated for this review. Please note that the review was not influenced by the Sponsor in any way. All opinions expressed here are only my own.