Critter Sticker Mania

If you were ever a member of the National Wildlife Federation in the USA, this sticker may look familiar to you. When I was a kid I got Ranger Rick's nature magazine, which was (and apparently still is) published by the NWF, and my parents subscribed to National Wildlife magazine. These stickers used to show up at our house a couple of times a year, mailed to us in perforated sheets. I think they were a bit like Easter Seals, meant to colorfully seal envelopes, probably with the hope that the recipient would make a donation.

When I was a kid I didn't write a whole lot of letters, but I did keep a journal. So I commandeered the stickers and from 1979 to 1983 or so, I'd put in one per journal entry as long as they lasted -- or rarely a whole collection of them, as above. (In that case I probably got sick of having them hang around and wanted to use them up!)

I recently thought I'd make a post out of them, so I got out my scanner and my journals and scanned these examples. In my memory I used them almost every day that I wrote, but I now see that I only used them for a couple of months per year, I suppose until they ran out.

I wish I knew more about them and their origins. Apparently the NWF used to sell albums so that the stamps could be mounted as a collection, with supplemental information about each species -- you can still find these annual albums, as well as loose sheets of wildlife stamps, on eBay and Etsy. They go back many decades, to the 1940s and 1930s.

I tried to occasionally lend some humor to the situation -- like providing a "distant view" of this red oak, with my not-to-scale pet turtle Stunky standing beneath it exclaiming "yowza!" Stunky was a constant presence as a character in my childhood journals.

I wonder who the artists were who created these paintings, and how works were chosen to appear on stickers. Was there a public contest? Or did the NWF contract with a regular group of wildlife artists to produce them? Did some paintings get rejected? I wonder what they looked like?

I subscribed to "Ranger Rick" for six or seven years, I think, and I kept them all in a huge stack in my closet. I remember my oldest issues were from 1974. I'm sure that magazine was hugely responsible for helping me develop some sense of appreciation for nature, but of course I eventually outgrew it and as a teenager I threw them all out.

But thanks to journaling, I still have the stickers! I'm sure I especially liked the ones with a Florida theme, but they could feature almost any critter, plant or fungus from any corner of the country. Mushrooms, plants, trees, fish, invertebrates, mammals from land or sea -- pretty much anything could appear on them.

Even teasels -- which as you all know we now have in our garden here in London. Who knew, when I stuck that sticker in my journal in February 1981, that 44 years later I'd be gardening with teasels in the United Kingdom?! Life takes us down some strange paths.