It is our first March in ages without tv and if it weren’t for Molly I would be sick over all the fabulous college hoops upsets we are missing. But, instead of  underdogs this year our household is rooting for an online owl. As part of a bird unit, my  daughter’s fourth grade class has been following barn owl Molly and her brood, as of last night 1 eggs and 3 owlets. Alcy turned us onto it at home and we’ve done little else but watch.

Last night Molly interrupted a small dinner we were hosting (yes, Molly aka my laptop had a seat at the table) by picking and pulling apart her own dinner: a rat hubby McGee had kindly dropped off some hours earlier. The accompanying screechy retching sounds really were questionable dinnertime fare. While our poor guests tried to keep their black bean burritos down, Molly regurgitated her rodent into her baby’s upturned mouths and our ten-year-old baby calmly offered color commentary including, “Her nest is made of all the pellets she pukes up after the rats are digested,” and  ”I’ve never even seen McGee, not once, but I guess he does bring her the rats.”

Disgusting or fascinating? A bit of both. And of course to many kids these terms are synonymous. In any case, when Molly, an absolutely gorgeous creature, tends to her ungainly charges, it’s tough not to be riveted. We never tire of that crazy head spin thing and only wish they had named her Linda, as in Blair.

Oh and don’t forget to keep checking in on Lily bear and her cub, she seems more active every day.

“Her passion for marine life began at the age of nine on a family trip to SeaWorld,” the AP reported about Dawn Brancheau, the trainer killed in Orlando yesterday. It stopped my heart.

Precisely this time last year my family took a trip to SeaWorld and my then nine-year-old daughter decided she wants to be a marine life trainer. She is no less passionate about it today, still practicing her underwater breathing in the tub nearly every night.

What a horrible reminder Brancheau’s death is of how little we humans know about these creatures we interact with. Of how in awe we must stay of them.

It’s too easy, though, to say we should respect them by simply leaving them alone. Oh sure, in a perfect world, enormous animals like whales and elephants would live safely and manifestly in the wild. But it is far from a perfect world. Humans continue to destroy wild habitat and wild creatures for reasons both crucial and trivial. Historically, it’s been the up close and personal experiences with animals that has translated into human caring and giving.

How many times do those who work in animal welfare hear some version of: Why give money and time to animals when people are starving and sick? It’s just not that simple.

We need one another on this planet. And the folks who work in the trenches at SeaWorld know this as well as anyone. They spend each day trying to come to a better understanding of what the dolphins and orcas, walruses and sea lions they work with need (beyond the basic comforts of course) and why they do what they do (were the orca Tilikum’s actions of malice, frustration, misguided play?) I trust folks at all levels at SeaWorld will be working overtime to learn from this incident. It’s what they do.

On CBS’s Early Show this morning, wildlife expert Jack Hanna compared the risks of keeping such large animals in captivity to the risks of space exploration and discovery, and specifically to the Columbia space shuttle disaster, “Why did we do that? We did that to learn more about space and how that will help us.” Why do we have orca shows at SeaWorld?  “We do it to educate folks.”

Hanna had worked with Brancheau and said of his friend, “She would want her legacy to continue.”

Brancheau’s sister, Diane Gross said much the same thing, telling an AP reporter that Dawn would not want anything done to Tilikum. “She loved the whales like her children,” said Gross.

You don’t have to spend much time with the trainers at SeaWorld to know they do what they do out of passion. They are as noble as the creatures they work with so often seem to be. And if my daughter keeps wanting to swim among them, I will keep jump-starting my heart and encouraging her.

We’ve been loving watching the Olympics aound here, even on the nights without Apolo Ohno. But tonight we will be giving equal time to the dogs, regularly switching over to the Westminster Kennel Club on USA.

I love the earnest continental narration so well-spoofed on Best In Show, the mix of bizarre evening attire and sensible footwear that must have Tim Gunn in hives, and the way those insanely short-leashed and blown-dry dogs manage to let their personalities shine through.

In preparation for the back-and-forth my daughter and her friends and I have been surfing Flickr playing Match the Olympian to the Canine. Above Lindsey Vonn and an Afghan Hound. Below, from top, Lindsey Jacobellis and a Komondor; Shannon Bahrke and a Standard Poodle; Bode Miller and a Bassett Hound; Shaun White and an Irish Setter; Hannah Kearney and a Saluki; Tony Benshoof and a Bulldog. Can anyone find the perfect match for Ohno?

Want to make your kids really, really, happy this Valentine’s Day? See if your local  animal shelter is having a bunny event today. February is Adopt a Rescued Rabbit Month so lots of shelters are hosting Valentine’s Day happenings. It’s Love Somebunny at the Dakin Pioneer Valley Humane Society (DPVHS) here in western Massachusetts , but you can find some bunny love near you here.

“I can’t believe we have a bunny,” my daughter said over and over again on the ride home with Chocolate Chip a year ago. She’s still saying it today and with only slightly less awe and reverence. Rabbits command that somehow, and deep adoration. What provokes such bunny love?

“It’s the ears,” says my friend Hans Teensma, book and magazine designer and serial bunny owner.

“They have awesome ears,” says Sandy Riggs, who says her three rabbits are “curious, affectionate, mischievous – and very soft.”

“Curious and affectionate,” agrees DPVHS adoption counselor Jane Rosazza, “and  wildly entertaining. They also help me stay in shape because I have my fridge stocked with fruits and veggies that me and my bun can enjoy together.”

“When I look into the eyes of my two bunny girls, I see trust and love,” says Betsy Alden who’s on the board at Dakin. “Rabbits are very timid and nervous and so you must handle them carefully and hold them close so they don’t feel fearful. They ask very little, need very little, and are just lovely to be around.”

“They’re smart,” says children’s book author Lynne Bertrand. “And the smart thing leads to mischief. When our rabbit is having a slow day, he’ll wait till the dogs are near his area and then deliver a sledge-hammer thump, which even makes me jump at the other end of the house. The dogs throw hair everywhere and scatter like cowards and I find them later under the beds. I swear the rabbit is looking at me with his smart eye going, ‘That, plus I’m cute.’”

I’ve got to admit, Chip is a much bigger, more gratifying presence in our household than I expected a bunny could be. As soon as I’ve gotten rid of The Others to school and work in the morning, and before settling down in front of the computer, I do two things. Refill my coffee and let the bunny out of her crate.

Having her nibble on my Uggs (she rejects bunny slippers, likes socks, loves Uggs and bare toes) makes it so much easier to stay seated and resist the laundry, dishes, cuticles…

The dogs are all guilt (walk me walk me the sun is shining shouldn’t you be outside? I want that toast crust, didn’t you hear me the first 500 times I asked?). The cats are fickle (oh I love your lap, I hate your lap, I love your lap and so on). Bunny is happy to roam this room. Lick my toe, chew the dog’s ear, do a twisty leap across the floor, stretch out in the sun, yawn, stand up on her hind legs, wiggle her nose, and repeat. She’s a great bunny for kids because she actually seems to love being held and having her ears stroked.

Many rabbits, though, are quite timid, as Betsy Alden says. Another friend at the shelter says it’s because they are “nature’s Cheerios,” prey for everyone out there. So you want to talk with the folks at your shelter about individual bunny personalities. And you want to talk with your kids about respecting the nature of the particular beast. In many ways this is the beauty of a bunny as a pet, how much it teaches kids in that regard. No one talks about this better than Ann Hodgman (no one talks about much better than Ann Hodgman come to think of it), so check out her article at Wondertime. If you get serious about bringing a bunny home, everything you need to know is in there.

Now, no bunny piece would be complete without the obligatory Fatal Attraction mention, so here it is. If you deeply hate Valentine’s Day indulge yourself deeply: Get some salted caramels and a really peaty Scotch, rent Fatal Attraction, and watch it — fast-forwarding past the bunny part, of course.

On the other hand if you deeply love the fact that Valentine’s Day is now less about fighting for a reservation at an overpriced restaurant and more about fighting over that last pack of red construction paper at Target, then forget the trite heart crafts and cakes and make some Love Bunnies with your kids (to celebrate the newest member of your family perhaps?).

Check out the Bunny cupcakes at FamilyFun here.  Fluffer bunnies here. Bunny valentines here. Clay bunnies here.  

It’s not just Punxsutawney Phil (and Buckeye Chuck and Staten Island Chuck and Wiarton Willie and Sir Walter Wally and Pee Wee …) crawling out of a burrow today. Wild groundhogs (alias woodchucks) really are emerging from their dens this week. But they’re not looking for shadows, they’re looking for love.

It’s all a pre-mating ritual, says Stam Zervanos, who’s spent the past 13 years studying groundhogs on a 140-acre farm at Penn State Berks, where he is an emeritus professor of biology.

At this time of year, female groundhogs start opening up their burrows, cleaning house, and scouting food sources while hormone-hepped males sally from gal burrow to gal burrow, trying to establish a territory of 3 or 4 mates. (How much ground could a grounghog hog if a groundhog could hog ground?)

Groundhogs are solitary except for a brief mating season and, according to Zervanos, the males have to get out there and “kiss and make up now so females aren’t too aggressive come early March.” It’s all about timing for the groundhog in love. They’ve got to prowl now, and mate the first week of March so the young will be born the first week of April. Any sooner, says Zervanos, and moms won’t find enough food. Any later, and the baby hogs won’t be fat enough to hibernate come October. (See a video about Zervanos’ research)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYov92KzSX8

That shadow thing is an old European superstition surrounding hedgehogs, for which settlers here subbed in groundhogs. Legend had it that on Candlemas (February 2, halfway between winter and spring) a sunny day would signal more winter, a stormy day meant spring was near.

If it’s a beautiful day in Punxsutawney today, it might help to know that, according to  Zervanos, Phil has correctly predicted the weather only 39% of the time in past 100 years.

Meanwhile here are some facts and crafts and so on to share with your kids on Groundhog Day:

Make an after-school cupcake or two (don’t go thinking you want to make enough for all 28 classmates, trust me on this.)

Recycle a toilet paper roll into a groundhog at http://www.dltk-kids.com/crafts/happy_groundhog.htm

Groundhog Day is Halfway to Spring Day Europeans used to say, “If Candlemas day is bright and warm ye may mend your auld mittens and look for a storm”

PETA’s calling for a robot to take over Phil’s job in Punxsutawney. Take this opportunity to talk with kids about what animal rights means. Is it about keeping animals healthy and comfortable? (Punxsutawney’s groundhog club prez told the AP that Phil is “being treated better than the average child in Pennsylvania.”) Letting them live as they would without human interference? If we never got to see well-tended animals in well-tended places such as the best zoo exhibits, would we care enough to protect them in the wild?

It all started with a hedgehog. Timothy Noah at Slate has a great column on the origins of the day.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite Christmas traditions was our trip to the Catskill Game Farm to hunt reindeer from helicopters. Oh wait that was The Rogue One. What we did was wait in line to see Santa, where my youngest brother and sister would bawl like banshees and my just-a-year-younger sister would match her line-time with lap-time going through an exceedingly specific wish. Betwixt chewing on my hair and shirt, I would dutifully recite my list and smile at Dad’s ubiquitous camera, all the while completely distracted.

Distracted because what I cared about was getting back to the pen of reindeer to give them a handful of sweet feed that only my palm could make so sweet.

I tried to bring my daughter a few years back only to find that, alas, after 70-plus years the family-run farm had closed in 2006. The daughter who had been running the business in recent years had suffered declining attendance that she apparently blamed in large part on family vacation tastes becoming more sophisticated. (What could be more sophisticated than live reindeer? Feeding sharks from cruise ships perhaps or maybe it’s those helicopter shoots…)

When I tried to find an alternative, google gave me lots of ugh rent-a-reindeer sites and pointed me to the megamagnificent Santa’s villages with reindeer aplenty at Disneyland, Hersheypark, Branson, Niagara Falls. A number of zoos pimp their reindeer exhibits this time of year, but it’s hard to find a place that really looks like Santa and his herd live there all year and for a precious few weeks prior to the big night a kid can visit them. Most of the people I talked with still pine for Catskill Game Farm. But a few suggested North Pole, New York, in the Adirondacks.

Or I guess you could head to North Pole, Alaska, which also assures the reindeer are “live” and bills itself as “the northernmost Christmas-themed land.” Not far, Alaska-style, from Point Barrow with its “northernmost totem pole.”

Photo by weblogs.cltv.com

I’m old enough to have suffered crushing disappointment when my first Sea Monkeys didn’t develop the tiny crowns and scepters depicted on the 1970s packaging. The “Instant Life” that finally resulted after I mixed the packet of what looked like Cremora with water was not a jolly-looking nuclear family of humanoids ready to play with me, but a hybrid form of brine shrimp—little feathery question marks with creepy black eyes.

Yet I’ve found Sea Monkeys to be not without their charms. I’ve since brewed up many other batches of these kitschy pets, most recently with my own kids. In addition to being a stroke of marketing genius, the name Sea Monkey refers to these eyelash-sized-animals’ curved tails. Of course, their greatest parlor trick is that they, in the words of the breathless packaging copy, “burn the spark of life.” Fertilized eggs can exist in suspended animation called “cryptobiosis” for up to fifty years until conditions are ripe for hatching-presumably, the presence of a plastic shipwrecked galleon.

For our most recent batch, we prepared the little plastic tank with bottled water and the water purifier provided. The next day, my 7-year-old son Ethan added the egg packet with a slightly trembling hand. A few days later, the hatched babies were at last visible as white pinpricks swimming about the tank “They’re alive!” enthused 11-year-old Hannah, paraphrasing Gene Wilder in Young Frankenstein.  ”Do they have brains?” asked  Ethan. (We read that they have only nerve cells, not traditional grey matter useful for doing the crossword puzzle.)

Sea Monkeys mature in about a month, then can be spotted mating the old-fashioned way: A pair can circle the tank connected for hours. You can use this as a teachable moment—or simply comment on how nicely they are “hugging.” Watching a monkey sup on a choice bit of algae or endlessly circle its watery world can be weirdly transfixing. With proper care, including feeding them their special dried chow, your colony can last up to two years-provided you keep the bowl well away from counter edges and resist the temptation to feed them, one by one, to your grateful betta fish.

Photo by toys.pop-cult.com

Photo by vbulletin.thesite.org

As a child, I used to covet the Mexican jumping beans advertised alongside the hot-pepper gum and X-ray specs at the back of my comic books. (Perhaps I was drawn to those jaunty little sombreros) My pleas, however, left my mother strangely unmoved. So when I ran across a website for these curiosities recently, I jumped to order some—now, ostensibly, for my own two children.

Upon their arrival via Priority Mail, the kids and I took the beans out of their little tin and placed them on the kitchen table. They were about the size of coffee beans, their greenish-brown shells accented with chocolate-colored centers. “So…are they like popcorn?” asked six-year-old Ethan. We warmed them in our hands to get them moving, and soon felt the first stirrings. “Whoa!” yelped ten-year-old Hannah, taken aback. I held one in a cupped hand to my ear—I could hear one emitting an eerie scratching sound, like the squirrels in our attic.

Mexican jumping beans are not beans at all, we learned, nor are they popcorn: They’re the seed pods of a flowering shrub, Sebastiana pavoniana, that grows in the deserts of Mexico. The jumping-bean-moth lays her eggs on the shrub, then the tiny baby larvae make their way into the seed pods, using them over the next year as both food and shelter. It’s the movements of the yellow-white caterpillar inside that’s responsible for the bean’s famous gyrations. In the 1940s, clever marketers, no doubt envisioning a lucrative future of gag gifts and science fair projects, started exporting these wiggly wonders to the rest of the world.  

Of course, the main attraction is watching them move. I would call jump a wildly optimistic verb choice—maybe wiggle, skooch, or jerk. They never achieve lift-off. But the random nature of their movements does make them oddly transfixing—the kids culled the liveliest ones out to “race,” coddled the lazy ones with more hand-warming. While it is a bit hard to bond with something that looks like a chipmunk’s breakfast, Ethan did christen the most robust one “Spike”—a name he eventually proffered wantonly among all twelve.

When keep in a cool, dark, place, well away from the coffee grinder, jumping beans can stay active for months, as ours did. Eventually, they stop wiggling as the larva builds a cocoon inside the pod to begin its transformation. A lucky few survive the Darwinian crap shoot—hungry birds and scorching heat in the wild, errant vacuum cleaners indoors—to emerge as moths, which live but a few days. Despite our tender ministrations, giving them little baths and letting them repose in our butter keeper as recommended, this grand finale did not occur at our house. (“A moth will not emerge from every jumping bean,” the instructions that came with our beans prophesized: “Do not be upset.”)  We had to content ourselves merely with some amazing YouTube videos of the metamorphosis.  

Once hatched, the short-lived moths eat nothing, so your sweaters and cereal are safe. South of the Border, the new moth would head for the singles’ bar that is Sebastiana pavoniana to consummate its brief life and begin the cycle anew. New jumping beans are “in season” summer through late fall after the seed pods fall to the ground and are harvested. (They can be hard to purchase the rest of the year, even on the global bazaar of the web.) While jumping beans are nontoxic, curious small children will need supervision to prevent them from choking or inserting one up a nostril– just to see what happens.

At our house, once-wary Hannah certainly warmed to them. Holding a wiggly one in her hand one day—probably Spike—she smiled and announced, “It feels like my beating heart.” 

Practicalities:

Jumping beans should be given a bath in nonchlorinated water once a week to keep them moist.

Treat them gently—no shaking, throwing, or dropping.

Avoid temperature extremes—freezing will kill them. They will be active longer if stored in a cool, dark place when not out for a hop.

 The larvae inside the bean subsist on the seed in the shell, so this is one “pet” you don’t need to feed.

Resources:

Book:  Lucas and His Loco Beans: A Tale of the Mexican Jumping Bean by Ramona Morena Winner [Eds: a picture book in English and Spanish for kids—beautifully illustrated and educational!]available through amazon

Web Suppliers: beansthatjump.com; mypetbeans.com; jbean.com seem to be the best.

 Photo by 1YSL