Nature Lover Gift Guide for Kids 2020

With kids, obviously, the best present is the quokka.

Given the pandemic, unfortunately, none of us who don’t already live on Australia’s quokka island (also known as Rottnest Island) are likely to be able to enjoy the quokka’s fabled charm, so we’ll have to think of something else.

I don’t actually have kids, but most of the of the products listed below have been highly recommended via the Twitterverse – which has never been wrong about anything – or recommended by actual people I know irl.

• I keep seeing a lot of buzz (chirps? squeaks?) around Owl Pellets. These sound a little disgusting to me, but that’s what makes me no longer a kid. According to Audubon:

Because owls often swallow mice, voles, small birds, and other prey whole, their digestive system has to deal with bones, fur, and feathers. The owl’s gizzard performs a kind of sorting operation: Soft tissues pass through to be digested, while indigestible sharp and hazardous bits like bones, teeth, and fur are formed into an oval mass. They pass back up the digestive system and are regurgitated as a pellet some hours later, often while the owl is at roost.

This company offers premium large owl pellets, premium regular owl pellets, and mini owl pellets. (the latter are presumably not premium?)

• Believe it or not, a board game based on birding, Wingspan, was one of the hottest board games of 2019. The National Audubon Society wanted in on the action, so they’ve just launched their own game based on Monopoly, with an incredibly uninspired name: Audubon Bird Spotting Opoly Board Game. Who’ve thought we’d live in a world with competing birding board games? These are wild times, I tell you.

• I like many of the options available on the Marine Education & Research Society site. If you have a particularly altruistic kid, you could sponsor a whale, which sounds nice, but when I was a kid, I always wanted something more than a trinket in return for my altruism. If your kid feels similarly, here are some options:

o   Octopus and Jellyfish stud earrings

o   Felting kit to make a harbor seal

o   Toddler octopus shirt

• Princeton University Press publishes a lot of great field guides – even if kids might not memorize everything in a field guide, they often like thumbing through them and looking at all the animals and starting to see the differences. Three I like are:

o   Backyard Birds Flash Cards

o   Dinosaur Facts and Figures: The Sauropods and Other Sauropodomorphs

o   A Pocket Guide to Sharks of the World

• These monthly science kits from KiwiCo came highly recommended via Twitter, as did these iSprowt STEM kits – and particularly the herb garden kit, which you can buy on its own.

• Many, many people recommended this or a different microscope – but especially one that’s portable & where you don’t have to put things on slides. Go ahead and shove a leaf under there & take a gander!

• Fossils for Kids: A Junior Scientist's Guide to Dinosaur Bones, Ancient Animals, and Prehistoric Life on Earth (Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find this on Bookshop.org, where I generally prefer to shop for books.)

I hope some of these have helped you recover from your disappointment at not giving (or receiving) a quokka this year.

Please leave a note and let me know what ideas you have for the littler nature lovers on your list!