Hoot by Carl Hiaasen

Hoot was a very good book.  It is about a boy named Roy who just moved from Montana to Florida.  While he's riding the bus to school he sees a kid about the same size as him running as fast as he can across peoples' lawns and driveways.  The next day he sees in the newspaper that someone put alligators in the porta potty that was in the same vacant lot where a Mother Paula's pancake house was going to be built.  Roy keeps seeing in the newspaper that there have been vandalism crimes going on in Mother Paula's pancake lot. Roy wonders if it has any thing to do with the boy that he on the bus.  A few days later Roy sees the same kid again that he saw on the bus. The boy brings Roy down to the Mother Paula's lot. The boy says that he doesn't have a name but people call him Mullet fingers.  Mullet fingers shows Roy that there are a ton  of  burrowing owls down in holes.   Mullet fingers said that he was the one doing all those things to try and stop Mother Paula's from building a pancake house in that vacant lot.  If they bulldoze all the land then all of the owls will die.  On the day of the Mother Paula's opening ceremony Roy, Mullet fingers, and Mullet finger's step sister Beatrice tell every body at the opening ceremony that if everybody is quiet for 60 seconds then the owls will come out of their holes.  Nobody believes that there are any owls and they just want to start building the pancake house but they listen.  After about 40 seconds the owls start coming out of their holes.  Everybody was amazed.  The pancake house manager knew that there were owls there but he didn't want to tell anybody because he wanted their pancake house there. The manager was arrested for trying to bulldoze the owls.  The vacant lot turned into an owl safety center.  There is a movie based on the book Hoot.