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This competition asked you to design a secret egg hidden somewhere in nature, and your entries went far beyond the obvious nests and burrows.
Eggs arrived disguised as pine cones, floating on leaf boats, perched on volcano ledges, tucked into cloud cover and even masquerading as chocolate Easter eggs to fool foxes. You invented brand-new species – sea divers, forest divers, pinewood gliders, horned salamanders – and built whole ecosystems around them, complete with food chains, predators and clever defence strategies.
Thank you to every reader who took up the challenge and thought like a parent bird, fish, reptile or imaginary creature trying to keep their precious egg safe.
"This is Floghorn. His mum put him on the edge of a Volcano. Yes a Volcano, on a ledge halfway down."
Sophie didn’t just designan egg – she built twowhole ecosystems…
Sea Diver
Diet: Eel leapers, water slips, ruby glimmers
Enemies: Fear of the Forest, swirlfish
Defence: Screeches to wake a slumber shark, which attacks nearby eel leapers – the leapers fly up and strike the enemy
Egg: Floats on the water, blue with white spots so it looks like the sea sparkling
Forest Diver
Diet: Silvermice, wood ladybirds, centaricas, miliricas
Enemies: Fear of the Forest
Defence: Curls into a ball with wings out, looking like a vine daisy
Egg: Hard-shelled to survive being dropped, then softens to let the chick hatch. Green with purple spots, to match the vine daisy
It’s the late Triassic, and these eggs are the first dinosaurs to evolve! They are very well hidden beneath a fern, but the predators are searching for them. Can the camouflage hide them well enough?
A paper cut out of how a baby fox would look like if hatched from a egg. It shows the life of a fox, the mother on the left taking care of the baby fox hatching and a young fox catching its pray in the back. The background is hand painted and the foxes crafted from painted paper.
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We were swept away by the response to this competition. Letters arrived from rivers across the world – the Thames, the Mississippi and many more unnamed waterways – each one brimming with personality, passion and a genuine love of the natural world. You gave your rivers voices that were worried, hop...
Somewhere beneath a grassy field right now, a tiny insect is building an underground loudspeaker. Male mole crickets engineer horn-shaped burrows that amplify their calls hundreds of metres into the night air – and your child can recreate the same science at home using nothing but cardboard and a phone. This hands-on experiment explores sound, shape and natural engineering in a way that is genuinely surprising. No screens, no special equipment, just a brilliant idea borrowed from nature.
Our Risky Moment competition invited young explorers to capture a risky moment in the wild – a split second when animals must make bold choices to survive. From daring leaps across rocky cliffs to dangerous river crossings, we received many hair-raising entries showing just how adventurous life in nature can be.
