Have you ever thought about keeping a journal on the outdoors?
How to keep a journal depends entirely on your personal preference. Your level of commitment and your availability will determine how far your journal will be able to take you. Here are some ideas, from simple to more advanced:
Comment – Take notes on the most beautiful things you saw that day or maybe the weirdest thing you saw.- Take pictures – A picture is worth a thousand words, right? There’s no reason you can’t cheat a little in your journal and just let the pictures speak for themselves.
- Save specimens – If a picture is worth a thousand words, what’s the real thing worth? You always can press or preserve interesting leaves or petals you find and include them in your journal.
- Identify – You can buy books to help you identify what you’re looking at, whether they are birds, insects, plants, mushrooms, critters, or all of the above. Take note of what you find. You might be surprised with what you end up with. You could look up a list of organisms that you should be able to find in your area and make it your goal to find each one. (If you don’t know where to start, I would suggest trees.) If you can’t figure out what you’re looking at right away, snap a picture to search online later.
- Teach others – With a little bit of practice, you’ll be able to identify many creatures or plants without having to look in a book. You might have learned an interesting fact about that organism, and by all means, you should share it! Knowledge about nature is perhaps one of the most useful types of knowledge; it has saved many lives. Knowing what plants are edible or what side of the tree moss always grows the fullest on (North) is an essential survival fact that has saved many people in sticky situations in the outdoors.
If you keep the journal going throughout the year, you can see your progress and also compare what you saw one day with what happened the year before. Pretty neat!
