The idea of a regular nature journal entrances me: the promise of both routine art, recording nature, and an archive of years-past is alluring. And yet, somehow I have never kept up with the routine. Until this year. This year was an absolute mess for us, however, through it all, I kept up with my year-long project of a nature journal.

This isn’t the first time I’ve tried to start a nature journal – in fact I have about 3 failed attempts lying in various sketchbooks in my desk.

I really wanted to be the kind of person who could keep up a fancy watercolour journal with thick cold-pressed pages, gorgeous sketches and lots of nature notes. But I’m not – something about the flexibility of the sketchbook and its blank pages put a lot of pressure on me to create something perfect each time and the pressure to compose layouts and record everything made me feel like a failure if I missed any event, causing me to procrastinate back-filling until I fully abandoned the project. I didn’t always have the energy to watercolour the birds or things I’d seen.

So I decided to try something different.

The Format

I picked up a Hobonichi Techo planner: while most people use this for daily planning, I liked the pre-formatted grid along with the pre-labelled days. There is a page for each day. I wouldn’t have to date pages for my entries. This may seem like a trivial feature but for me it lessened a lot of the pressure. The nice things I saw that day simply goes on that page it belongs to.

The paper is also gorgeously smooth (and fountain pen friendly). It wrinkles with watercolour but handles it just fine (doesn’t tear or bleed). I love wrinkled or textured pages so this is a bonus for me although other people may not enjoy this quirk of the paper.

Ultimately, I don’t really think the specific journal I used matters much: simply that for me buying something with one page a day that was pre-dated and could handle watercolour/mixed media was enough. I can buy the same style of planner every year and have an archive slowly building over the next years. (Spoiler: I loved the project, so will be continuing!).

My “Rules” for Success

• Pages are allowed to be blank. The goal isn’t to record everything I see or even journal daily, simply to record positive memorable moments when they happen.

• I don’t have to draw the entry if I don’t want to. It’s perfectly acceptable to print out a photo I took on my phone (or found online) and paste it in. It’s about the record not necessarily the art.

• I can spend as little or as long as I want on an entry. Quickly doing a 2 minute sketch of a bird and recording the species can be enough and a entry properly completed.

• It has to be easy to back-fill. Entries can be as simple or complex as I want and come with longer written text or merely a simple identifier of what happened that day. This journal is A6 size, so also quite small which helps keep down the overwhelm of both writing entries and formatting the layout for the art (the journal does come in A5 but I wanted something pocket-sized and approachable).

How It Went

I started the journal in early February, as I didn’t come up with the idea until late January. So already I backfilled January. Granted, there wasn’t too much to backfill as my partner was extremely ill through the first quarter of the year, but it was a start. Something to focus on. At that time, I hoped that I’d be able to fill a lot more in the summer and fall (me now knows that that time doesn’t ever come, and I never fill it up as much as I wanted to). But that’s ultimately absolutely okay. The important part isn’t that I filled it up completely, it’s that I completed the project.

You can see in these early months, I endeavoured to list the temperature and weather. A nice idea, but I found it too troublesome to keep track of / annoying to back-fill and cross-reference “historical” weather online. So I dropped that after the first few months.

I’m a real fan of the worms. This was one of the highlights of the journal. On one rainy, gloomy winter walk, our forest path was covered with dozens if not hundreds of earthworms (FAR more than a normal rainy day). This was truly a remarkable amount. A small event, one that brought some joy, now is something I can remember and reflect back on through recording it in my journal. Not every entry has to be something groundbreaking or exciting. Sometimes there’s just a LOT of worms!

The journal also took the pressed flowers well, although those require a lot of preparation and planning as the flowers need time to dehydrate in my press, so I didn’t end up doing that a lot. Although it does look cool. I think going forward I’ll keep my pressed flowers in the herbarium journal I bought instead of trying to add them into my journal in most cases.

This page, I was particularly proud of, despite it being exclusively printed images. I was able to capture the feeling of the marshland walk, as well as some exciting feather finds and research about said feathers. I had found some Northern Flicker feathers and was immediately excited as one was yellow (normally they’re red here, due to the carotenoids in the flicker’s diet). Yellow flickers are more common in Eastern Canada, although these divisions are not perfectly linear and I’d definitely heard of yellow-feathered Northern Flickers being found here.

In my feather find, two tail feathers had been found together, and I realized the bird must have been an inter-grade: a flicker that has both yellow and red feathers due to its mixed diet. Thrilling! I had no idea that could happen.

These two pages document what was a particularly fun low-tide trip–a lot of nudibranchs and bones! And a piece of skate cartilage! Couldn’t be better! I had a lot of fun drawing the nudibranchs, but wasn’t really feeling like the effort of drawing the full collection of harbour seal bones I had discovered. So in go the photos and I’m quite pleased with the way the mixed spread looks.

A fun page: identifying and documenting all the different tracks alongside the lake. (And also a Franklin’s Gull wing part I found on the cattails.)

I was able to document our travel down to Los Angeles and Joshua Tree through photos. And while I wasn’t able to collect feathers or anything of the sort, I was still able to document my finds. (I seem to have a dead-bird affinity… stumbling upon this grebe washed up on the shore. I know some people might find this distressing, and it can be, but I also really like to rare opportunity to see a beautiful creature up close in a way I wouldn’t normally have the opportunity to. I won’t wax poetic about all the dead birds I found this year though as I know it might be upsetting.)

The last days of the year posed an interesting point to document that we haven’t had any arctic flow weather patterns this year, which meant no real serious overnight freezes (no snow or ice!); the fungi have been enjoying the warm weather, quite unlike the previous year where it froze early in November.

It was a joy to spot a new (and slightly more uncommon bird) on the last day of this year. Definitely seemed like a positive omen for 2025.

Reflections / Visions for the Journal in 2025

I found that when I lessened the pressure to draw for every entry, I actually sketched far more entries than I expected. Reverse psychology, or something. I was also extremely relieved (especially when it came to backfilling difficult periods of the year) to be able to print out some photos and record those entries in a stress-free way.

Next year, I want to try to increase the amount of entries – hopefully the year won’t be continuously marked with traumatic events that reduce our capacity to enjoy nature. I also want to build on the small notes I made on the changing seasons: I think that it’ll be interesting to track changes for when cherry blossoms bloom each year, when I spot seasonal birds for the first time, and more.

I also want to be more dedicated with how I “accession” nature finds like feathers, bones, or dead insects into my collection. I want to keep a more detailed log of what I find, when, and where in the empty pages in the back of the journal. I did mark off on the calendar page in the beginning of the book when I found something, but just a colour dot on each day. There are entries that correspond to most of these dots but not every one. I want to be more rigorous with that process this year.

I am hopeful that if I could keep up the journal and not grow disinterested in it during the hardest times, I can flourish with it in better times. Here’s to a better 2025.

P.S. There have been a whole new influx of subscribers! Welcome! I’ve not been too active this year, but I’m hoping to really nestle into writing this substack regularly again this year. I have some neat entries that have been put on the backburner too long.

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