'All parents today are raising offspring in an increasingly polluted world - I felt moved to write about it," says Derbyshire author

Helen Jukes, who lives in a village near Matlock, said: “In today’s world, depending on where a mother lives, her age, lifestyle and socioeconomic status, her milk may contain traces of DDT, paint thinners, dry cleaning fluids, flame retardants, pesticides, rocket fuel, and ‘forever chemicals’ – synthetic materials developed to resist breaking down, which accumulate in human bodies, and have been linked to a range of health issues. These chemicals have been found in the maternal bodies, milk and eggs of wildlife, too.

"We might like to think of motherhood and young infancy as a time of naturalness and purity, but in fact all parents today are raising offspring in an increasingly polluted and uncertain world. I found this very shocking, and felt moved to write about it, hoping to start a wider conversation about how to make our environments safer and more habitable for all."

Her new book, Mother Animal, is the culmination of a three-year project. Helen said: “Early on in my research for Mother Animal, I came across studies that had found toxic chemicals in breast milk – they’ve been found in the cord blood and amniotic fluid too.”

Helen’s experience as an expectant mum trying to understand the changes in her body led to her researching and writing the book.

She said: “Pregnancy was so weird – much stranger than I’d anticipated. It wasn’t just the growing bump; my whole body felt completely changed. New dark hairs formed around my ankles and chin; my voice pitch dropped, and I developed dark skin patches known as melasma around my eyes that made me look a bit like an owl. And that’s not to mention the hormonal roller coasters, or the morning sickness!

“I began looking around for stories to help me make sense of it all, and soon began reading about mothers of the animal kingdom. I learned about orangutans and bonobos, giraffes and humpback whales, burrowing beetles and poison dart frogs. Here were mothers every bit as strange and wild as I was feeling – and they were complex, and infinitely varied too. In the natural world, motherhood can’t easily be reduced to a particular type; it’s fluxy and strange, and so fascinating! I wanted to tell its story…"

Helen, whose daughter is now five years old, said: “Mostly I read scientific journals rather than observing animals directly, but I did write about the parenting habits of some of the creatures living in and around my home; ants, spiders, woodlice, beetles and so on.

“I wrote about pregnancy, birth, nesting and caregiving in the animal kingdom, and discovered lots of things I didn’t know before. For example, 90% of birds parent in couples and split the caregiving between them – flamingoes, emperor penguins and pigeons even produce a nutritive ‘crop milk’ for chicks from a sac in their throat (flamingo parents turn visibly paler through the course of feeding, as their white chicks turn pink!).”

Helen discovered that there are single frog dads, same sex parenting couples and species which form creches for their offspring and live as part of cooperative breeding groups.

She said: "Communal breeding is rare in the animal world, but it’s been observed in fish, insects, arachnids, amphibians, birds and mammals – and it was critical to how our own species evolved. Lions, honeybees, some mice and killer whales all raise offspring together. Emperor penguins group their young in communal creches while they go out hunting; so do giraffes, who have been observed sending out distress signals following the death of another’s calf. Magpie jays also raise their young together – and it’s a parenting approach that seems to bring benefits in terms of skills acquisition, since the young birds are better at harvesting arthropods than species raised by fewer helpers. I found these stories of cooperative parenting quite inspiring, and was very struck by the fact that while our culture is geared towards the nuclear family, as a species we evolved to parent together.

"What we can learn, I suppose, is that motherhood is a wildly diverse undertaking, often pushing bodies to their physical limits; what mothers need, if they’re to parent successfully, are safe and nurturing environments.”

Helen, who teaches at the University of Oxford, is an award nominated author. Her first book, A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings was shortlisted for the Books Are My Bag non-fiction award and listed as a Book of the Month by BBC Countryfile. She said: “I got a hive when I was living in Oxford and felt pretty ground down by urban life. Learning about honeybees gave me a very different perspective on the city – the book was about my own experiences, but also about bee folklore and ancient history, language and labour and love.”

*Mother Animal is published by Elliott and Thompson and available from Amazon and book stores including Waterstones and Blackwell’s.