Why teaching children about urban wildlife is key to protecting it

3rd March 2025

We’re thrilled to have partnered with children’s book author and illustrator, Siski Kalla. For every purchase of her new book Let’s Explore Snails, 50p will be donated to Earthwatch, helping us bring nature to more urban communities across the UK.

Here Siski shares why she decided to write about urban wildlife for children.

Urban wildlife is just as valuable and important as rural wildlife but receives far less attention. It’s time to change that, one book at a time!

When you think about nature and wildlife, chances are you’re not immediately envisioning an urban setting, a city street, skyscrapers, or even a suburban garden.

But there’s a huge variety of wildlife living right on our doorsteps if we’d only take the time to look for it. Roughly 85% of us in the UK live in urban settings, but we’re not the only ones!

With gardens in the UK making up a larger area than our National Nature Reserves combined, they’re also home to a wonderful variety of wildlife.

From tiny invertebrates such as ladybirds and snails, amphibians such as frogs and newts, reptiles such as slow worms, birds of all kinds including falcons and kites, up to comparatively large mammals such as hedgehogs and foxes.

Let’s focus on urban wildlife

Which is why I decided to illustrate and publish a series of children’s books focusing only on urban wildlife.

If children can be shown where to look, what to look for, and understand more about what they’re seeing, they’ll also value and appreciate it more. And their families too! (There’s a great deal to be learned from children’s books, you might be surprised!)

Understanding wildlife helps you value it

“You can’t love what you don’t know”, is a quote attributed to a variety of people. Regardless of who wrote it, I believe it’s especially true when it comes to protecting wildlife and nature in general.

Once you’ve learned that:

• snails will ‘return home’ after a night of eating and exploring,
• they seal themselves up in their shells if it gets too cold or too hot,
• they use their ‘feelers’ (which are really called tentacles) to see.

You simply can’t view them in the same way! They’re not ‘just pests’ that eat your favourite hostas, they’re fascinating little animals doing all sorts of wonderful stuff in your gardens and parks!

The importance of ‘feeling useful’

This understanding of the importance of knowledge in valuing wildlife is also why I wanted to collaborate with Earthwatch for this children’s book series.

Earthwatch has long been a promoter of getting us ordinary folk involved in protecting and promoting wildlife, not just in terms of volunteering, but getting involved in a scientific way.

I didn’t study science at university and always felt that meant I couldn’t be ‘useful’ in the same way a ecologist, botanist or zoologist might be.

But that’s what’s so great about ‘citizen science’. Anyone can take part and every contribution is genuinely useful.

Providing the tools… for you to use!

Right now, so much of our wildlife is at risk, and we face all kinds of scary news relating to nature. Being able to do something is key to maintaining hope, I think.

Earthwatch provides the tools for people to be able to get involved, to act, to change things on a local level, and to learn, too.

I wanted to provide something along those lines in my children’s books, too. So I included information on how to rescue a snail and how to protect them in general within the main section of the book.

I hope that the Urban Wildlife Explorers series gives children the tools they need to explore the wildlife they can find nearby, learn more about it, and, importantly, act on what they’ve learned, too.

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