Throughout her career as a writer and editor, Lenora Todaro has seen her work appear in such publications as the New York Times, the Atlantic, and the Village Voice. But it was Todaro’s lifelong passion for wildlife—and the opportunity to write about it for Catapult in 2019—that helped inspire her debut picture book, Sea Lions in the Parking Lot: Animals on the Move in a Pandemic. The book contains 12 vignettes spotlighting how creatures around the world behaved when the world became a different place during the pandemic. We spoke with Todaro about her insights on conservation—she’s just begun a graduate program in animal behavior and conservation—and how this project is the culmination of some of her childhood dreams.
You’ve been writing professionally as a journalist, critic, and columnist for many years. How did your most recent project come together as a children’s book?
I’ve wanted to write children’s books for my entire life. I wrote my first one when I was 10 in a little notebook that I still have. When I was working in children’s book publishing [as a former publicity manager at Scholastic], I loved working with the authors and I always would sketch stories on the side. But I never submitted anything, because life just kind of takes over, and I started writing other types of work.
I was reviewing children’s books for the last couple of years and I really had my head in that world. My head was in that world anyway because of raising my three [now teenage] sons. And during the pandemic I was seeing all of these stories about unusual animal behavior out in the world. There was a [viral] police video of a kangaroo hopping through empty streets in Adelaide, Australia. An octopus went swimming through the canals of Venice, which had never happened before. I started taking notes about this and I began seeing them as these vignettes, these story windows. I spoke to my editor Maria Russo [editorial director of mineditionUS]—who was my editor at the Times when I was writing book reviews. We were brainstorming about book ideas and she loved this one about looking at the pandemic through wildlife. That this is a way to open a conversation with children that perhaps has a little hope in it, because what we’ve been seeing in a lot of cases is that wildlife and nature really do bounce back when we get out of the way. And the trick now, of course, is how do we take all that we learned from our quieting down during the pandemic and find a way to coexist with wildlife so that we can help their survival. In my book I write about frogs and sea turtle hatchlings that survived in record numbers during the pandemic. There was a gorilla baby boom in Uganda. What can we do now to keep that happening? This was all stuff that I was thinking about.
The book is a result of lots of things converging at once. I had been writing a column for Catapult about urban wildlife in New York City, called “Sidewalk Naturalist.” I was also volunteering at the Prospect Park Zoo as an an interpreter [for Wildlife Conservation Society Now], leading tours of school groups talking about wildlife, habitats, and adaptations. It really is two childhood loves of mine: I always wanted to write children’s books and I always wanted to be a wildlife conservationist. Now I’ve arrived at this book and I’ve started graduate school and it’s all come together in a way I could not have predicted.
Is there an account of animal behavior in the book that was particularly fascinating to you?
I love them all so much. At the end of the book is a little valentine to the Bronx, which is where I grew up. There are coyotes there, and learning about coyotes living in the Bronx was one of the things that pushed me onto the path of writing about urban wildlife. I have a special fondness for coyotes and these particular ones because of that experience.
Also, over the summer my son and I got certified to dive and I had a chance to see sea turtles in their world. It’s one of the most beautiful experiences, to be under the ocean, witnessing their life, irrespective of me; I don’t matter.
And lions. I love the lions. I spent part of my very early childhood in Kenya [Todaro’s father was teaching at the university there] so my very first impression of wildlife is of it being wild. That’s where I saw elephants and giraffes and rhinos out in their world. That was a very formative experience for me.
As a wildlife enthusiast, do you have a favorite place to observe animals? Where, if you could go anywhere to see them, would you go?
I would love to be able to see mountain gorillas in Uganda and Rwanda; to go to the Arctic and see a polar bear in the wild; and to dive off Australia and see the Great Barrier Reef before it disappears.
The thing I enjoyed most about writing the Sidewalk Naturalist column was discovering all of these parks and woodlands in New York City that I didn’t really know existed before. I loved walking through the woods of Van Cortlandt Park and being in Richmond Hill in Staten Island. There’s a family of four beavers there, or at least there were. I had the opportunity to take a canoe ride down the Bronx River with a historian and it was so beautiful to me. Having grown up in the Bronx and never being on the Bronx River, it was an amazing experience. Volunteers and conservationists and scientists have worked so hard to clean that river up and make it a place where people would want to come and experience nature. There are beach areas in Brooklyn where you can see horseshoe crabs when they’re around; there are seals off the coast of New York City—off of Orchard Beach and Staten Island. I had a chance to take one of the dolphin and whale trips with one of my sons; there are lots of whales in New York. Surprisingly, New York City is an incredibly rich place to observe wildlife.
What do you hope this book can accomplish in terms of raising awareness and encouraging action around the issue of climate change?
I hope first and foremost that children like the stories. I tried hard to write from the point of view of sitting on the creature’s shoulder, seeing life happen. And I try to work with strong images when I can because I remember loving that myself and remember my sons loving that.
After that, if they like the stories, I hope that they have more empathy for wildlife. Empathy is crucial in all realms of life right now, our human environment. If someone is so inspired, I hope maybe they ask their family or ask their teachers or friends how they can do something good for wildlife. That might mean volunteering with a local organization—in NYC people can help count and tag horseshoe crabs, the Audubon Society has its Christmas bird count, there’s monarch butterfly monitoring, there are people who assist frogs crossing the road during breeding season. There’s so much. But also, I hope they get to be out in nature and find a place where they can sit and maybe close their eyes and listen and smell and feel that connection and feel the realness of the interdependence that we have with nature and with wildlife.
Every community has its own wonders and problems and maybe some child will come away from this book and want to solve that. And I hope that kids find some of it funny, even. I love Annika [Siem]’s illustrations. She is trained as a scientific illustrator, but she has this great sense of humor. In the sea lion spread, you see them up against the shuttered store looking at a fish sign. And if you look at the peeper frogs crossing a clothing line, there’s a mask hanging there.
Of course, the underlying theme of the book is habitat preservation and habitat loss. But what’s most important, really, is falling in love with wildlife. Just be kind and thoughtful about wildlife and the environment that protects them and us. When I was seven or eight, I used to get Ranger Rick magazine. My friends and I had a Ranger Rick nature club, but we didn’t really know what kind of project we could do. We lived in the city and there were a lot of roaches. We thought we could protect the roaches and save them. So, you work with what you have.
Sea Lions in the Parking Lot: Animals on the Move in a Pandemic. Lenora Todaro, illus. by Annika Siems. MineditionUS/Russo, $18.99 Oct. 978-1-66265-049-9
