Come Home, Little Eel

Come Home, Little Eel is a new illustrated bedtime story from the Somerset Eel Recovery Project (SERP). It follows Luna, a European eel, on one of the most remarkable journeys in nature: from the Sargasso Sea, across the Atlantic on the Gulf Stream, into the rhynes of the Somerset Levels and, years later, thousands of miles back again.

Written for young children, the book carries a surprising amount of real science and local knowledge. Children meet each stage of the eel's life cycle by name as Luna reaches it, from egg and leptocephalus to glass eel, elver, yellow eel and silver eel, and collect each new word in a word bank at the back, which links to SERP's teaching packs for Early Years to KS3. Along the way they learn how the tide carries a glass eel inland, why an eel takes on the colour of the riverbed, and the little-known fact that a young eel is neither male nor female until it matures. They learn the words of their own landscape, such as rhyne (said "reen"), sluice and estuary, and something of Somerset's eel heritage, from eels paid as rent to the straw ropes still hung over barriers today to help elvers climb.

The story is honest about the eel's steep decline since the 1980s; as one old eel puts it, "there are not so many of us." But it is equally clear that people make the difference, in both directions. The barriers in Luna's way are ours, and so are the eel passes, ropes and opened gates that help. At the book's most powerful moment, Luna reaches a pumping station where people have asked again and again for a fish-friendly pump that still hasn't been fitted, and survives only because someone walks out in the rain to open a gate. The book also shows what good land management and room for nature can do: riverbanks left wild, new wetlands, beavers slowing the flood and a river running clean.

Above all, it sets out to make an invisible animal visible. People love bees because they can see what bees do, but nobody sees what an eel does. The book invites children to wonder what might be living unseen in the rhyne or drain near their home, who built the walls and gates in the water, and whether they could help, because every helper in the story is an ordinary person: a farmer, a fisherman, a teacher, a class of children raising elvers. It is honest, too, that parts of the eel's life remain a mystery, since no one has ever seen European eels spawn in the wild. And beneath it all is the question that makes it a bedtime story: what it is like to be small and go a very long way alone.

Vanessa Becker-Hughes, Founder and Director of the Somerset Eel Recovery Project, said: "Eels have been part of Somerset life for centuries, and they're still here in our rhynes, but hardly anyone ever sees one. We wanted children to see what an eel does, the whole extraordinary journey, and to know that ordinary people, including them, can help it come home."

Book details: Come Home, Little Eel: Luna's journey from the Sargasso Sea and back. Published by the Somerset Eel Recovery Project. A4 landscape, with full-page watercolour illustrations.

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