We're Celebrating Wildlife Day With Wild Names

Take A Walk On The Wild Side With Our Favourite Wildlife Baby Names!

Today is World Wildlife Day – a day dedicated to celebrating and raising awareness of the world’s wildlife. Each year, World Wildlife Day is given a theme and this year the theme is “Listen to the young voices”.

With this in mind, we thought we’d take a look at the names that we’ve printed over the last year and celebrate the young voices with names inspired by nature – (especially as the closest thing to wildlife here in our office is a rather alarming number of potted plants and Harvey, our office dog, who isn’t so much wild as extremely mild.)

For boys, the most popular wildlife-inspired names are based on five animals – Lions, Bears, Dogs, Wolves – and Doves!

While the most popular group is lion-based names (including Leo, Leon, and Lionel), the single most popular name is actually Callum – which is a Gaelic name meaning “Dove” – while the sixth most popular name is another dove-inspired name: Jonah.

Our third and fourth most popular groups are names that mean “Bear” (including “Arthur” and “Orson”) and “Dog” (represented by “Caleb” and its variant “Kaleb”), while our fifth most popular group (the wolves) has the most variations – including names as diverse as Channing, Conan, Lyall, Lycan, Rudy, and Wolfram.

For girls, inspiration comes from Sheep, Antelope, Birds, and Lions.

The first group includes both “Una” (which means “Lamb”) and the most popular wildlife-themed name “Rachel” (meaning “Ewe”). The second group includes “Tabitha”, which you might be inclined to think of as a name associated with cats although it’s actually an Aramaic name meaning “Gazelle”.

Birds are represented by the names “Paloma” meaning “Dove” and “Merle” meaning “Blackbird” (along with “Robin” and “Wren”), while the lion is represented by feminine versions of “Leo” such as “Leona” and “Leonie”.

Animals are also a popular inspiration for nicknames; amongst our customers, “Bear” and “Teddy” are the most popular animal-based nicknames for boys, while girls are most likely to have cat-inspired nicknames, such as “Cat” and “Kitty” – although we also love the “big cat” nickname chosen by one of our customers: “Tiger”.

(We’re also very fond of the nickname “Wolfie”!)

We hope you take some time this weekend to celebrate the wonderful (and sometimes weird) wildlife that we live with on our planet; whether you go big and take a trip to a zoo, garden centre, aquarium, or wildlife park to learn more about the world around us or you stay a little closer to home and just spend some time giving your pets (or your garden’s wildlife) a little extra TLC.

Remember, you can request ANY name when you buy Stikins ® name labels – whether you want to stick to a simple First Name & Surname format or you prefer to include a personal nickname – and  you can use our multipurpose Stikins ® name labels to label pretty much ANYTHING (including any walking boots and equipment you use to spend more time in the great outdoors or even labelling those all-important boxes of pet treats so there won’t be any arguments – or unfortunate mix ups!)