Living Books: Stellaluna

Stellaluna is still a small bat when an owl attacks her mother in flight, knocking Stellaluna loose and sending her tumbling into a nest of three baby birds. She hangs upside-down from the edge; the baby birds imitate her. Their mother returns and delivers a swift correction—Stellaluna is ordered to eat bugs and abandon the habits of her own kind. When she finally learns to fly well enough to venture out, she drifts too far ahead and stumbles across a colony of fruit bats who laugh at the way she clings by her thumbs instead of her feet. Among them she finds her mother. Reunited at last, she brings her family back to meet the birds who raised her. The story closes on a gentle observation: for all the ways a bat and a bird are different, they are more alike than either might have expected.