On a hot summer night, in a dry farmhouse attic that’s the perfect nursery, a mother bat gives birth to her brown bat pup. Over the course of the summer months, the baby bat grows into an independent youth and is weaned from its mother’s milk. Now it must learn to capture prey—a lesson that is re-created in an intense scene with vivid text and an image portrait of echolocation. Straightforward sentences convey important aspects of bat biology while at the same time expressing an earnest appreciation for these unique mammals. Rick Chrustowski’s warm and realistic illustrations created from heavily layered colored pencil drawings on watercolor wash beautifully portray the bats and their environs in a story that concludes as the weather grows colder and the bat colony migrates to a rocky cave, the location of its winter hibernation. (Ages 5–8)

Whoosh! Big brown bats rush off on their nightly hunt, but one stays behind to have a baby.

As summer turns to fall, the baby bat grows bigger. He learns to fly, then to hunt. Soon he has fattened himself up for the long winter ahead, when he’ll hibernate until the spring sun returns once more. Big Brown Bat is a 2009 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.