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You've been sending us some extraordinary diary entries – full of ingenuity, wild imagination and genuine nature knowledge. Your islands were home to winged badgers, injured wolves, mysterious felines and ring-tailed lemurs; your narrators traded coconuts with crabs, deduced their location from the animals around them and faced jaguars armed with nothing but a shell-knife.
Thank you to every reader who picked up their pen and set foot ashore.
"Some birds were rainbow, and some were pink. Some were colours that never even existed! I wish I had a camera with unlimited storage to show all the people the things I saw on this island."
"I woke up with the gentle crash of the waves tickling my body."
"I may be scared, lost on an island miles away from the mainland, but now, as I gaze into the eyes of this wild creature, I feel safe. I feel in awe."
Dear Diary,
As I was sailing peacefully through the sea, I witnessed a thunderstorm. It was so turbulent it tipped my boat over. My only hope was a deserted wild island that I saw in the distance. Seeing as it was my only option, I swam for my life towards this ominous island that wasn't even on my map. I then climbed on shore catching my breath and then started gaping as I stood right in front of a dragon's blood tree which was quirky, grand and marvellous. This tree is supposed to only live in Socotra, a remote island in the Indian Ocean.
After a while of nervously pacing back and forth along the shore, I reluctantly entered inside the dense forest. To my surprise, I saw beautiful monarch butterflies and incredible kingfishers. Suddenly, I heard a deafening din which sounded like a roar of a ravenous Sunda clouded leopard!
"I realised that you don't need Wi-Fi when you have wildlife and beautiful sea and forest."
"At night the twinkling stars shined over me like glitter."
"Suddenly a furry, stripy head poked out… it was a TIGER!"
"To the west I see the biggest tree in the world!"
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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. 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.
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.
