A little guide to the daily magic.
Every day, two Secret Animals quietly appear for Martha. They are chosen by magic, tucked into the day's little record, and ready to be discovered like a tiny nature spell.
Secret Animals are two daily animal surprises. They might be familiar, funny, magical, tiny, huge, sensible, suspicious, fluffy, splashy, or magnificently odd. Each one has a profile, a fact, and a little history of when it has appeared before.
Some say Ken and Polly keep a tiny lantern lit at the edge of the Secret Animals wood. Each night, when the house is quiet, they listen for rustles, hoofsteps, wingbeats, splashes, squeaks, and the occasional suspicious crab shuffle. By morning, two animals have wandered close enough to be chosen for Martha's day.
The original idea is simple and lovely: Martha gets two secret animals for the day, and they can be popped into the lunch box as a tiny surprise. A quick peek, a fun fact, maybe a little drawing or note, and suddenly lunch has a secret mission attached to it.
Yes. Anyone can check the website and do the same thing: find the day's two animals, learn the facts, and carry them into school like a shared little secret. If Martha's friends join in too, the whole class can know the animals of the day, compare favourites, and turn an ordinary lunch break into a tiny club of discovery.
The Past Animals page keeps a diary of the animals that have already appeared. Each animal profile also shows its own previous appearances, so you can see when a favourite has visited before and who it arrived with.
Maybe because childhood is partly made from small repeated wonders: a note in a lunch box, a creature to look up, a fact to carry around, a reason to ask someone else what they think. Secret Animals are not really about the database or the website. They are about giving a day a tiny doorway, and seeing who chooses to step through it.