Wildlife

Wildlife is the throughline connecting almost everything Jenkins writes, and The Emperor’s Egg represents it here: a picture book built around a male emperor penguin’s months-long vigil balancing a single egg on his feet through the Antarctic winter, using that real biology to carry a narrative with genuine tension. It won the Times Junior Information Book of the Year Award and has stayed a favorite read-aloud since it was first published.

The wildlife focus isn’t incidental. Jenkins spent roughly a decade at the World Conservation Monitoring Centre and has worked freelance for WWF and various UN environmental bodies since 1990, and that conservation background is what grounds nearly every animal he’s written about, penguins, tigers, apes, and chameleons alike, in real fieldwork rather than secondhand research.

Jenkins’s conservation writing rarely stays abstract. The Emperor’s Egg roots its wildlife message in one animal’s specific, observable behavior, a father penguin balancing an egg through months of Antarctic winter, rather than a general statement about climate or habitat loss. That pattern holds across his catalogue: broad conservation themes delivered through a single, closely observed creature a child can actually picture and remember.

The wildlife theme extends past the animals themselves into how Jenkins frames them: almost every book includes some acknowledgment of human impact, whether that’s hunting pressure on great apes, habitat loss for tigers, or simply the harshness of the Antarctic environment a penguin has evolved to survive. That framing is consistent enough across the catalogue that it reads less like an add-on message and more like the actual reason each book got written. The Emperor’s Egg is also one of the few Jenkins titles adapted into another medium, with an animated version of the book named to ALSC’s Notable Children’s Videos list in 2007, extending its reach well beyond the original picture book format.