I know for most people it was pets, shows, or documentaries but how were you?
For me I’ve just been around animals since I was little and my family went to the Houston Zoo or the Moody Gardens Aquarium a decent amount, so I was just exposed to them
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Just being out in nature is what got me into it! As a toddler, I would pick yellow flowers (Yellow was my favorite color at the time) and observe them. I would catch beetles, toads, myriapods, lizards, turtles, almost any organism interested me. I remember going on bug walks when I was between two and six, and I would take one of those bug bungalow mesh holding containers, and would walk along the path, stopping to flip rocks along the way, until I reached my destination (About half a mile away :)), where I would stop and collect true insects and moths and such along milkweed and other pretty plants, which grew like a wild garden there! In this way, I found a tarantula the size of my palm (Now), and a black widow about five inches including the legs. Needless to say, we were not allowed to look there again! Those are some of my best childhood memories!
Of course, now I take photos instead of grabbing at organisms, which is probably safer for both of us. It’s a better way to preserve the moment, anyway.
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Oh, and I would put earwigs, ground beetles, greenhouse millipedes, etc. in a sour cream container and watch them crawl around in circles, bump into each other, climb on top of each other, and earwigs raising their rears in protection when a beetle drew near. I would spend hours out doing that!!
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Being outdoors. Often alone.
I remember watching and learning birds by flight patterns by myself on the school playground at 6, also where I discovered things like spittlebug spit and needed to know.
Always been fascinated and entertained by arthropods
I was taught about plants and flowers and the proper way to water them by my neighbor when I was 3.
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When I came to the farm which was surrounded by a forest and far from the nearby city, it was impractical to not get interested in wildlife and still spend free time (that was time when we had no internet connection here as well). When my dad brought a bird field guide with all the birds of India, me and my brother became interested in birds, then snakes, then butterflies, then dragonflies, etc. Then I got a camera and we finally got the internet connection (which meant I started using iNat), both those things boosted my interest for nature significantly. Now I’m never looking back…
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Thanks for this great question!
We are social creatures, so it makes sense to bond over our shared love of wildlife. Because it’s so natural to seek out your tribe, this question has come up many times over the years.
I’m not sure whether the mods prefer to merge these threads, or to let each one stand on its own, but here are some related threads, in case you would like to explore previous answers:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/what-originally-got-you-into-nature/ (2020 Jan 7)
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/what-makes-you-a-nature-lover-or-for-professional-what-makes-you-work-for-nature/ (2021 Aug 6)
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/what-was-your-spark-organism/ (2025 Jan 15)
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I am going to hideously date myself.
When I was young, television was quite limited. There was no cable or internet or satellite, just local channels, and programming was limited to certain hours. I spent lots of hours outside, my mother having grown up on a citrus farm and believing in the power of “medicinal fresh air”. Because of where we lived, far from my cousins, my choice of playmates was often limited, so I learned to self amuse by being still and observant out of doors.
But one of the few shows I was allowed to watch was Jacques Cousteau’s show about marine life, which was mesmorizing. It was shown on Sunday nights, and I sat in front of our very small, very new colorized television to watch, though sometimes I was tasked with holding the antenna to better the transmission.
But also on Sunday evenings my mother would wash and comb my long hair and then I was forced to sit under a harvest gold, egg shaped hair dryer to dry my hair fully, because another of my mother’s beliefs was that wet hair caused pneumonia. So if I fussed while she combed, because I had the tangliest hair on the earth, this delayed the process and while she would put the dryer in front of the television, I would not hear with the jet engine roar of the dryer over my head. And if I attempted to lift it ever so slightly, both to hear and because it was approximately as hot as the surface of the sun and my ears would roast, she would remind me of my imminent demise from pneumonia.
So I became fascinated with nature both from being out of doors for my own health and also from watching (but often not hearing) Jacques Cousteau.
(My husband and I were delighted to find that we shared this show when, having recently had three day old kittens dumped in a box at our doorstep, we agreed that the only female should be named Calypso.)
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i’ve always had a love of nature: some of my earliest memories are family trips to shenandoah or western maryland, i spent much of my childhood in the small chunks of remaining woodland in my suburban hometown, every summer my prepubescent legs would be covered in mosquito bites and poison ivy rashes. as a teen i became more of an indoor kid (thanks, existence of the internet!), but after a few years of leaning into tech i realized i needed to get back outside if i want a chance at enjoying life.
after a couple of years trying to refine my nebulous love of nature into something more specific, it wasn’t until i started learning more about spiders and insects that i found something that really did it for me. that was nearly half my life ago but my interest and love for arthropods has not faltered.
in fact i have learned to shy away from the word ‘wildlife’ - what follows tends to be almost exclusively focused on vertebrates, ignoring 90% or so of animals. i’m a dang bugnerd.
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My next older brother used to chase me with frogs, turtles, and snakes. I learned if I could catch them faster than he could, he left me alone.
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I’ll ‘blame’ it on my mom :-)
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When I was very young, she would take us to a nearby park to walk around the small lake. She would catch blue-bellies (Western Fence Lizards) and let my brother and I each carry one on our clothes as we walked around the lake. In addition to being gentle with them, she also made sure we knew we had to let them go in the exact same spot she caught them in before we went home.
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We moved to a house that backed onto (what seemed at the time) endless areas of fields and ponds. Keeping in mind this was a long time ago…. she would tell my brother and I to go out there to play. Among other activities/games we made up, often we’d just look for/find things (tadpoles, strands of toad eggs, bird nests, etc.) When we found something that we didn’t know about, she would come back out into the field with us to tell us what it was & help us learn about them.
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Knowing I seemed to have a budding interest in nature, she got the local wildlife rescue center to let me volunteer there (at the ripe old age of 12). Every Saturday, for well over a year, she would drive me the 15 miles +/- each way to go ‘work’ there.
I could name more, but this gives the flavor of it.
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That sounds amazing! I’m so glad you had those experiences!
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Hiking and finding critters in my yard, along with watching a lot of wildlife shows where they’d always find some crazy insect or reptile. Made me wanna go out and find something equally as cool.
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I grew up in a rural area. I was a bookworm with an Encyclopaedia Britannica.
A really good science teacher who would give the back story behind various discoveries. Another science teacher who was really approachable and funny who didn’t make science scary. A biology teacher who got us outside collecting plants.
Always have liked travel and using a camera.
Moving to the Northern Territory which is biodiversity rich and very different to NZ.
Judo because it got me fit and confident enough so when I did my first ever hike it was the Via de la Plata Camino route. Noticing the transition between plants as the days progressed. Learning to watch for tracks of my fellow pilgrims.
Meeting my partner who likes wildlife photography and likes to buy me ridiculously pricey camera equipment. He’s also got lots of herp knowledge, hunting knowledge, horse and farming knowledge as well as plants like orchids.
And then stumbling across iNat as somewhere to put all those photos and which gives me permission to go bonkers. I’ve always been a curious person and I blame my mother for encouraging me to ask “But why?” when it came to human behaviour.
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@donna165 science teachers are just the best. My chemistry teacher last year (I have him again this year for advanced chem) helped to get me into wildlife. One day last year, after asking him for help identifying a beetle I saw (he is extremely knowledgeable on anything nature-related), he gave me an old book about beetles that sparked my interest in animals. A month later, he told me about iNaturalist, which I had never heard of before, and I joined. My first observation is the buttercup oil beetle that started it all! From there, I became interested in plants, and anything else I saw outside. I started going outside almost every day after school and every day in the summer which was good for my physical and mental health. I became interested in bones and would go looking for bones outside with my dad on the weekends. I’m patiently waiting for winter to be over so I can go outside again; my happiness becomes even greater in the spring. Unfortunately I still have a ways to go. I’m at home because of a snow day.
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Umm… it always just was how things were.
Grew up in a port town on the SE coast of Finland. It was small enough to have forested area on the island where the city centre was (a wobbly rectangle about 4,5 km x 2 km). Used to spend a lot of time with my aunt and my bro there, learning birds, plants and critters. We had journals to record stuff in. My parents and grandparents and aunt always spoke about things with their names. For us, it wasn’t “a tree” or “a butterfly”. For us, it was the species.
As a kid I spent even more time on the archipelago of rocky islands typical of the Gulf of Finland. I have absolutely no idea how much time I spent in the forest and on the steep rock hills and cliffs on the island our Summer house was. On the “backshore” you would see to the horizon and the waves were impressive during storms. I remember there were the wide cracks in the solid rock near the shore, that filled with sea water during storms, and occasionally if the water was high. There were many small Amphipoda, that hid among the Cladophora glomerata growing there. We used to catch them, and carry them back to the sea.
We spent a lot of time at sea as well, if not on my grandfathers larger boat, then rowing or using a sailing dinghy to visit the surrounding islands. My parents did a good deal of fishing, and the gulls knew to be ready when the nets were brought back to shore. If it was Winter (we went there over ice, so not so much a “Summer” house), they’d put the nets under ice. Oh… I miss the sea so much it hurts and brings a tear to my eye if I think about it for too long.
And I was in the scouts and all over the country in forests and on fells, swamps and rivers. One of my fondest memories is from a scout training camp. There were some warm huts, but me and my group decided they were too full. It was Winter, and the temp was -32°C. Bright full moon and the Milky Way across the sky. Air was absolutely still and pretty much the only sound was from foxes yapping. We decided to put our gear to the test, stomped the snow, put our mattresses and sleepingbags there. It was difficult to get sleep as it was simply so beautiful. But we slept good after we finally got sleep. 
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When I was 7 years old, I was on a trip to Madagascar. On the plane ride from mainland Africa, the pilot shoved me out the door and into the ocean. There I landed face-first into a clump of seaweed, and I realized how cool seaweed and the rest of the outdoor world was.
Just kidding. I guess I was just always like this.
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A confabulist? Just kidding.
We always had pets around our house: tropical fish, gerbils, hamsters, salamanders, a gartersnake I found when I was maybe 8 yrs old. Our tiny living room was a mini-zoo. My parents tolerated this and maybe encouraged it. I developed my interest in zoology pretty early.
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When I was about four years old I went on a walk with my family on my grandfather’s cattle farm. We were walking below the dam of the pond with the older kids off ahead and me behind with my parents when I found an adult female Common Snapping Turtle probably out on her nesting foray. Got me interested in turtles. Started catching turtles, mostly Painted Turtles, in that pond every summer and keeping them in my backyard. Started looking for other things like toads and salamanders when not trying to catch turtles.
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I grew up watching call of the wild and the crocodile hunter with Steve Irwin. Nuff said
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I too grew up watching steve irwin, especially his videos on reptiles and amphibians, also I watch a lot of NKF Herping which is what really inspired me to start herping
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