Do you stifle a gasp when your co-worker squashes a spider without second thought? Or is rage at the squirrels on your bird feeder starting to take up a little more of your day than you’d like?

Harness the power of empathy to try and understand just what our animal companions are going through.

Read on for 10 true to life animal stories that will help adults and kids alike develop compassion and feel more connected to often underappreciated critters.

Table of Contents

Why Compassion and Empathy are Important  

Developing compassion is an important trait for both children and adults alike. Compassion is linked to higher rates of happiness and social connection and lower levels of stress and depression.

In developing compassion for others, we also develop the ability to have self-compassion. This is vital to forgive ourselves for mistakes and not ruminate on problems.

Compassion and Nature Connection

In addition to the numerous personal health benefits. Compassion is also one part of the 3 part framework for nature connection pedagogy. Anybody who is seeking to deepen their own connection to nature or that of their students and clients needs to include practices that foster compassion for the natural world.

Using Stories to Foster Compassion

Humans are ingrained to love stories. Evolutionarily, they helped us from important social bonds necessary for survival and taught us the consequences of mistakes without having to make the mistakes ourselves.

Stories are also a powerful tool to foster compassion. Through a story, we can be transported to another world and gain a new perspective. Studies have shown that effective stories lead people to take action, not just experience compassion.

So what makes an effective story:

  • It needs to be high quality, with believable characters that have depth
  • It needs to be spellbinding and transport the listener. This allows the listener to fully immerse themselves in the world of the characters, and also releases oxytocin to the brain

About These Animal Stories

I wrote these stories about common animals to inspire compassion and empathy for the animals we share our lives with. These stories are all based in scientific fact, but use a narrative approach to convey the information. I used simple language that can be easily understood and appreciated by kids or adults.

The animals in these stories do not have names, instead I have chosen to use the name of the animal as their name. This small shift in language provides a more personal connection to the animal.

How to Use These Stories

For Yourself

Examine your own biases about the animals below. Are you terrified of spiders? Or really annoyed at the squirrel stealing birdseed from your birdfeeder? Let the stories you feel drawn to guide your journey into developing compassion and empathy.

Combine stories with meditation. Meditation is also a powerful force for developing compassion.  Try a guided meditation for compassion and envision the animal you are trying to connect with during the meditation.

Start small. Consider how you can show small acts of compassion to the animals around you. Can you walk around a spider web instead of knocking it down, now that you know how much effort the spider put into it? Can you place a birdfeeder out for Chickadee and all the other birds surviving the winter? (While it may seem like the most compassionate thing is to feed animals, make sure you do your research before feeding wildlife. In most cases, while you have all the best intentions it is actually harmful to them and therefore a very non-compassionate action.)

With Children

Ask children what they notice. Get their input into what animals they are seeing and what they observe the animals doing. Telling stories about what children are already noticing and experiencing will lead to a more meaningful connection.

Tell the stories extemporaneously. These stories are short and simple. There is no need to memorize them word for word, but once you have the gist try telling them to children from memory. Your storytelling will be a little bit different and that is perfectly OK! Release your need for perfection and lean into the spontaneity of the moment.

Encourage children to come up with their own stories. While these stories are based on fact, try encouraging children to come up with their own fictitious stories about the animals. This is a wonderful exercise in imagination and creativity, you might be surprised by what they are able to come up with! For older children, they can write down all or part of their stories for some literacy practice.

In Nature Therapy or on a Forest Walk

Embrace the unexpected. It is best not to have a strict plan for the walk, but to take inspiration from what opportunities nature presents around you. Consider yourself the guide who is there to tell the stories of the animals that make themselves known.

Slow down the story. Could you take a short story and make it stretch for the entire walk?  Tell one small piece of the story as you move from tree to tree.  Add in reflection questions at various points in the story and allow silence for reflection. Add other sensory experiences such as songs, musical instruments, fragrant plants, etc

Find the stories your clients can connect with. If a client is experiencing a particular hardship or pain point in their life, think about what animal experiences something very similar to them. For example, if a client suffers from a lot of worry, painting a picture of a busy little bird who is always frenzied and bouncing around avoiding predators may feel especially relatable. Once this connection has been established, you can introduce stories about animals that are the opposite to help them achieve more balance.

The Stories

#1 Chipmunk Survives Winter

Chipmunk gathers seeds and nuts in his large cheeks. Just one more, just one more, just one more, full! His cheeks are completely stuffed with food.

He scampers off to his burrow, to add this feast to the rest of his food for the winter. But what if another animal were to find his food and eat it all? Chipmunk is smart and thought ahead—  he stored multiple caches of food.

When winter arrives, Chipmunk crawls into his burrow for the last time until spring. He hunkers down and falls deeply asleep. His breathing slows, his eyes close, and his body temperature plummets. If you were to pick up Chipmunk right now, he would feel icy cold.

But Chipmunk is not like Bear or other animals that sleep all winter and living only off their fat. Every few days Chipmunk needs to wake up so he can eat. His body temperature rises slowly and in a few hours, Chipmunk is awake!

He nibbles on the seeds and nuts that he has saved and he uses the bathroom too. Then Chipmunk drifts slowly back to sleep, and his eyes close, and he gets very very cold.

Finally, after getting very cold and then warming up again for months, one day Chipmunk wakes up and it is spring! He will leave his burrow and run and play and eat before he starts all over again in the summer, filling his cheeks with seeds.

Learn all about Chipmunks with this fun field guide for kids!

Want to read more stories about Chipmunk? Check out Chirp: A Chipmunk sings for his friends

#2 Chickadee Gets Very Thin

It is winter and Chickadee is one of the smallest birds not to have flown south. Instead, she bustles around all day eating seeds and staying active to keep warm. When you are cold like Chickadee does moving also help you to stay warm?

It seems too soon, but night has fallen and Chickadee must find somewhere to sleep safely. She finds a tiny little corner of a tree branch just perfect for her. She fluffs up her feathers and tucks her beak in to stay warm.

Then something extraordinary happens. In a single night, Chickadee will lose 10% of her body weight. This would be like if a human who weighed 200 pounds lost 20 pounds in a single night.

As soon as the sun starts to rise, Chickadee hops off her porch and begins moving and eating for she is very cold. She must eat enough seeds today to gain back all 10% of her body weight. Tonight she will lose it all over again.

Want to help Chickadee this winter? Consider hanging up a bird feeder.

#3 Baby Robin Learns To Fly

After Mama Robin lays an egg, it only takes Baby Robin about 2 weeks to hatch. When he first gets out of his egg he has see through skin and giant eyes, he looks kind of like an alien!

But every day he grows a little bit bigger and stronger. Sometimes his parents will feed him 100 times in one day. Can you imagine eating 100 snacks in a single day?

After only 13 days, Baby Robin is almost grown up. He jumps from the nest expecting to fly and PLOP Baby Robin hits the ground. What happened? Well, Baby Robin isn’t big enough and strong enough to fly yet. He needs to get his wings nice and strong and grow some better feathers.

Over the next 10-15 days, Baby Robin practices his flying over and over. His parents still help feed him while he is learning how to be a grown up bird. After falling down lots of times, Baby Robin can fly and keep up with all the adult birds! Instead of taking 18 years to become a grown up, Baby Robin has gone from a baby to a child to a teenager to an adult in only 30 days.

Use the picture book Mama Robin to introduce young readers to these common birds

#4 Squirrel Buries Lots of Nuts

A gray squirrel looks adorable

Squirrel has found the perfect nut! Well, when you need to bury 10,000 buts before winter just about any nut will be the perfect nut. Squirrel picks up the acorn in his mouth and tries to remember where he buried his other acorns, oh! He remembers!

 Acorns are buried near the Eastern Pine Tree. Squirrel buries his nuts over almost 7 acres of land. It’s a lot to keep track of, but this way if a competitor finds one of his food stashes Squirrel will not have lost all his food.

To help himself keep track, Squirrel buries nuts that are similar near each other. He has a place for acorns and a place for beech nuts and even a place for the sunflower seeds he gets from the bird feeder.

Squirrel runs off with his prized acorn in his mouth when he spots another Squirrel watching him. To throw him off his tracks, Squirrel digs a hole and pretends to throw the acorn in. He is trying to fool the other Squirrel.

After that, Squirrel runs off with his acorn safe and sound to his real acorn cache. Squirrel cracks the acorn to keep it from germinating and buries it.

Can Squirrel actually remember where he buried all 10,000 nuts? Well not really, but it all works out. Every nut that Squirrel forgets has the chance to grow into a beautiful tree.

Want to try your hand at collecting nuts just like Squirrel? Check out The Sneaky, Snacky Squirrel Game for Preschoolers and Toddlers

Remember the facts from story with the song “Gray Squirrel“

#5 Toad Grows Up

Laid as one egg in a string of 4,000, Toad always had a very small chance of making it to adul-toad-hood. Lots of creatures feast upon toad eggs and hatched tadpoles, that is why female toads lay so many eggs.

Toad’s life has been one of transformation. She hatched looking like a small fish, a tadpole. She breathed through gills and lived entirely in the water. But as she survived the odds while her siblings got eaten by hungry fish, newts, beetles, and birds, Toad started to grow lungs so she could breathe on land. Then she grew limbs to walk on land too.

Next, Toad absorbed her tail (humans absorb their tail during development too! Although that happens in the womb for us) Finally she leaves the water to begin an entirely new life on land and leaves her water home completely behind.

She will return to it in 2-3 years to breed, however even the chances of her living that long are slim. Most toads live only one year in the wild. Good luck Toad, you are already lucky for getting so far!

See pictures of all of Toad’s life cycle stages in the book, The Secret Life of a Toad

#6 Owl Looks In A Mirror

Imagine your are looking at your face in a mirror. What do you see?

Now imagine there is an owl sitting on your shoulder staring into mirror as well.

How are these two faces similar? They are both oval and flat. They both have big eyes centered in the middle of their face.

Now how are they different? Owl has a beak instead of a mouth. And where is Owl’s nose? He has nostrils at the base of the beak, but Owl doesn’t need a large nose like us because he doesn’t need to smell well.

In fact, most owls can’t smell very well at all, but they have incredible hearing. Would you want to give up one of your senses if it made one of your other ones incredible?

Owl hears much better than us because of his special ears. Even though Owl may have tufts on top of his head, these are not his ears! Owl’s ears are hidden under the feathers of his face. His whole face acts like a satellite dish to funnel sound into his ears.

Some owls even have one ear higher up on their head than the other to help them pinpoint exactly where the sound is located. Can you imagine if one of your ears was down by your mouth and the other was up in your hair? Wouldn’t looking in a mirror be so funny?

Looking for a way to help Barred Owls in your area? Assemble your own Barred Owl Box

Check out “A Barred Owl Sings to Me at Night” A song I wrote to help kids learn the sounds of owls!

#7 White Tailed Deer Looks For Food

Deer’s family history is one of extremes. In the early 1900s, Humans had hunted Deer to a point of near extinction.

But then, Humans decided to help. They placed rules on hunting Deer and slowly the families began to grow bigger and stronger.

Over the next 100 years, Deer families would multiply exponentially. Deer’s predators like Wolf and Coyote, were eradicated by the Humans. Humans also built more houses with yards, and Deer loved having more to eat and more edge habitat to raise their families. Deer families grew, and grew, and grew.

Now there are more Deer than Mother Earth can support. Every year some of the Deer starve to death because there is not enough food.  They end up eating so many of the native plants and small trees to keep themselves alive, that it threatens the forests ability to stay alive.

Often Deer even gets in trouble for eating plants that the Humans wanted to keep just for themselves. But can you really blame Deer for trying to eat enough to stay alive?

Read Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’ beautiful book The Hidden Life of Deer to follow these graceful creatures through a year in their life.

#8 Snake Visits His Friends

All buried into a den Snake and all his friends huddle up for the winter.

“Well” say the scientists “The snakes are trying to keep warm by denning up together”

But then, spring returns. The weather warms and the snakes are called by Mother Nature out of their den.

As they exit their den, the snakes head off in small groups. Sticking together even when it is no longer cold.

“Well” report the scientists “Now they are sticking together because it is the mating season”

Mating season comes and goes. The snakes continue spending time with each other. Each snake knows the other snakes around them as individuals. They enjoy spending time with some snakes but not others.

“Well” says the scientists “We must learn more about this.”

The scientists take the snakes and put them in an enclosure in the lab. They put a colored dot on top of each snake’s head. The scientists introduce different groups of snakes and watch to see who hangs out together. The scientists take pictures of the snakes’ social groups.

Then they take out all the snakes and wash out the cage making sure there are no smells or other signs left of the snakes.

Then they put all the snakes back into the tank.

The snakes return to the same social groups as the first time.

“Well” says the scientists “Snakes can form “special bonds” with other snakes”

A snake has an individual that he enjoys hanging out with when he doesn’t need to, does not act as a mating partner, and will offer help when they need it, what would you call that?

Do you have an “ick” factor towards snakes? Do they just kind of creep you out? Learn to appreciate the unique beauty of snakes with a snake coloring book for kids or adults.

#9 Groundhog The Architect

Groundhog’s talent is digging.  In fact, she received the name “wuchak” from the Algonquian people (their word for digger). When English speakers heard that name, they started calling Groundhog “woodchuck.” But doing anything with wood is not Groundhog’s specialty, although she will eat tree bark sometime.

When Groundhog digs, she goes all out. She can dig herself a burrow that is 8 to 66 feet long. Not only is her home impressively large, Groundhog also includes many amenities. Her burrow has multiple entrances. She also builds several rooms. Groundhog has a bedroom to sleep in and a nursery for raising her young. She even has a bathroom!

Sometimes Groundhog gets in trouble for digging too close to human homes. But she doesn’t know how close to human houses she is. After all, how weird is it of Humans to build a house above ground?

Want to learn more about the secrets of Groundhogs? Click here

#10 Spider’s Secrets

Spider’s silk is full of mysteries. The silk that comes from Spider’s spinnerets is 5 times as stronger than steel, yet also has impressive abilities to be bended before it snaps. Humans want to know what exactly makes up Spider’s silk so that they can make some of this useful material for themselves. But, so far, Spider has kept the big secret to herself. The Humans have gathered a few clues but they have only manufactured the silk by creating a bacteria that can manufacture it for them.

But none of this concerns Spider, after all her brain is only the size of a poppyseed and she focuses solely on what is immediately around her.

She works on building her web, to serve as a defensive home, letting her know when predators are nearby. But this home also serves as a net to catch her food.

Spider has another secret. She has poor vision, living her life by feel and vibrations. Yet, when she captures a fly, kills it, and stores it in her web she knows exactly where it is later. How does Spider know where her food is?

Some scientists believe that Spider’s memory somehow extends to her web. The silk she strung serving not only as home, a net, but also as a map of her mind.

But for now, Spider is keeping this secret to herself.

Want to try to figure out Spider’s secrets yourself? Grab a magnifying glass, a field guide, and head out to look for spiders in your area!

Did you enjoy these animal stories? Leave me a comment and let me know which one is your favorite!