When Little Mouse Got Stuck by Ruth Owen and Emma Bowring is a classically beautiful picture book with an important reminder inside!

It is available now and we have included it in our bundle for World Clean Up Day. You can hear from Ruth and Emma below along with taking a sneak peek inside…

Is That Plastic Bottle a Death Trap?

In summer 2022, after picking up someone else’s rubbish, tossed from a car into a Cornish hedgerow, we decided to turn this depressing situation into a children’s picture book.

As ardent “litter pickers”, we realised that recruiting the children in the back of the car to our cause could be the way to give Britain’s wildlife a brighter future. We wanted to create a story that would inspire children to shout – “Don’t throw that litter from the car!”

The result was When Little Mouse Got Stuck!

When Little Mouse – a harvest mouse who lives in a hedgerow with her babies – becomes trapped in a plastic bottle, the story has a happy ending thanks to some hikers.

But in a recent study, Keep Britain Tidy found that more than 8% of littered bottles on roadsides contained the dead bodies of small animals.

We are both lucky enough to live in beautiful rural areas. But every day, we see food packaging, plastic bags and even used nappies littering the narrow lanes and hedgerows where we live.

We’d been individually writing and painting for many years, so it was wonderful
to finally work on a project together.

We know that most children care deeply about protecting wild animals. But sometimes the adults around them are not as aware of the damage their actions can cause. Kids can be very influential when it comes to protecting the environment and we want their enjoyment of the book and their love for Little Mouse to feed through to adults who may not give a second thought about littering.

(From Emma) I usually work in oils, painting on large canvasses. Bringing little mouse to life in watercolour for the pages of a children’s book was such a treat. Working with Ruth, I roughly sketched out and planned each page and then worked on creating the watercolours of Little Mouse in a realistic style – but with a little extra personality!

We wanted the scenes from Little Mouse’s hedgerow home to have the feel of a nature journal and be reminiscent of Beatrix Potter’s artwork.

I even enlisted the help of the squirrel in my garden to pose for the scene where a grey squirrel investigates the plastic bottle, but is unable to help Little Mouse.

We hope that Little Mouse’s story will inspire kids and adults to ALWAYS find a litter bin. We also hope it will help reduce the amount of rubbish that’s simply left behind by people visiting beautiful, natural places. If our book can save just one wild animal from a terrifying and painful death, creating this book will have been worth it!

Once you’ve read the story of Little Mouse and her family, will you ever
be able to drive past a littered plastic bottle again?

Ruth lives in Cornwall and has written hundreds of science and nature books for children. She is also part owner of Ruby Tuesday Books with her best friend and business partner, Shan White.

Emma lives in Devon and is an award-winning wildlife artist. Emma has worked with the Born Free Foundation, Save the Elephants, Orangutan Appeal UK, Secret World Wildlife Rescue and many other conservation organisations to raise funds by auctioning her work.

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Huge thanks to Ruth and Emma for sharing how When Little Mouse Got Stuck came to be, see more about the book below as well as our World Clean Up Day bundle which features various books that focus on the topic of waste and conservation.