"Feasts for Beasts" at the Long Island Children's Museum

Order up!  Today's menu includes pigs, ants, tree bark, and a very popular side dish of mice. Visitors to the Long Island Children's Museum's new permanent exhibit, "Feasts for Beasts," are invited to become servers at this child-size diner, where a raccoon, bear, beaver, snake, and leopard have come to feast. Give them the wrong food and a sugar container will light up "no," while the right food will generate a "yes."  

It is rare to find an exhibit that seamlessly weaves imaginative play with factual content so nicely.  The beauty of the exhibit is that it makes cooperative play a necessity. On each visit, I observed groups of children of all different ages meeting for the first time, having heated discussions about who should feed whom, while others preferred to be served.  

Outside the diner, visitors will find plenty to keep busy. A variety of live critters, including a bearded dragon, white tree frogs, a ball python, a giant African millipede, and Madagascar hissing cockroaches are on display. Many are elusive and prefer to hide. Fortunately, a live “crittercam” has been installed to allow visitors to spy on the animals and observe unique behaviors inside their enclosures. Time it right and you may get to see the animals being held up close by specially trained museum animal handlers. 

Also on display is a living, working beehive, rescued from Hurricane Irene.  The queen and her worker bees have settled nicely inside their new home. The glass enclosure provides viewers a firsthand look at the division of labor within the hive as children observe pollen being deposited and bees emerging from their cells.  

Content throughout the exhibit can be gleaned by pushing, pulling, and spinning various exhibit components. Visitors can manipulate mouth parts as they discover how animals chomp down on their food. An engaging video shows how butterfly, cockroach, and fly mouth parts move in slow motion.  Lion, bear, and zebra skulls can be touched as can a set of great white shark teeth. Both new readers and prereaders will be able to navigate through with minimal adult assistance as lights, pictures, and models get the ideas across. Meanwhile, independent readers will find no shortage of reading materials to devour.  

—Denise Trezza