This is part 3 of a 3 part series. See also:
Ok, so this is where you start getting super nerdy. It’s ok to be super nerdy, nobody is going to bully you…well, they might, but they won’t if you keep it to yourself and don’t tell anyone else.
What I’m calling a seasonal field diary is really just a type of journaling, a record keeping practice which collects clusters of daily observations made throughout the year. Year after year. It isn’t a daily bird tally, although it could be that if you were so inclined. And it isn’t just about birds.
The aim of keeping a seasonal field diary is to collect observations about pretty much everything:
- weather (max/min temps, wind, rainfall, stability, humidity etc)
- flowering
- fruiting
- insects (abundance, dominant types, hatchings, odd behaviours, butterfly species, sounds, etc)
- fungi
- frogs (calling, chorusing, quiet times, etc)
- mammals (mating, babies, vocalising, fighting etc)
- reptiles (emergence after winter, hunting behaviour, shedding etc)
- birds (could be a daily list, but for me it’s a record of anything unusual, notable or relational to other things. More on this later)
I started keeping seasonal field records when I first moved to my property on the north coast of NSW, around 25 years ago, so I’ve now got around 500 record sheets. When I get a spare couple of months I’ll input the records into a digital database and interrogate them to generate a seasonal calendar for the property.
Although I’ve tried to maintain a practice of writing up at least one field sheet per week over that quarter century, I’ve definitely noticed there are periods in most years (mid-summer for instance) where nature tends to go quiet, plus its just stupidly hot and humid outside. Plus the biting midge population goes nuts, so spending time sitting in the forest is kinda exasperatingly unpleasant. Hence, the frequency of my field notes become rather lazy in December / January, while I’ll likely do three a week in August/September when all the migrant insectivores are returning and it’s simply divine outside.
A single diary entry should ideally only take about 5 minutes to complete. If you’re anything like me though, you’ll spend 99% of your time jotting down a long list of animal and insect observations but then just stare blankly at that section of the page for plant observations. I realised a long while ago that I was rather myopic in my way of engaging with natural landscapes. While I was laser-focused in noticing anything to do with birds and vertebrate critters more generally, I wasn’t paying enough attention to the world of flowering, fruiting, leaf health, manna and lerp production etc. I was seeing the forest but not the trees.
But I knew that if I didn’t create loads of field observation data points about plant stuff, my emergent seasonal calendar would be weak and lacking a fundamental dimension of insight. In fact, it would be absent of trophic complexity. So, I started forcing myself to notice plants and what they were doing week to week. And it turns out they’re actually pretty damned busy.
Anyhow, I’ve chucked in a random selection of some of my own diary records so you can get an idea of how easy they are (and how inscrutable my handwriting is….sorry about that).
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