August Nature Journaling: The Beginning of the End of Summer
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August has a particular feeling that I find hard to describe but immediately recognise. It’s summer, fully and properly. Hot days, long evenings, the smell of cut grass and warm tarmac. And yet there’s something else underneath it. A faint shift in the quality of the light. The first hint of something turning.
I noticed it properly for the first time when I started keeping a nature journal. Before that, August was just the middle of summer. Holidays. Warm evenings. Nothing much is changing. But once you start paying close attention, August reveals itself as one of the most dynamic months of the year. Things are moving. The first leaves are beginning to turn on stressed or shallow-rooted trees. The swallows have already gone, or will go very soon. Berries are appearing. Spiders are suddenly everywhere.
August is the month when summer quietly starts to pack its bags. And if you’re watching carefully, you can feel every stage of it.
The Swifts Leaving
I want to start here because it always catches me off guard, no matter how many years I’ve been watching for it. Swifts arrive in late April or early May with tremendous fanfare, screaming over rooftops, filling the evening air with noise and energy. And then one day in late July or early August, you go outside and realise they’ve gone. No announcement. No farewell. Just gone, already heading south towards Africa.
The date the swifts leave is one of the most important entries in a nature journal. Note it every year. Over time, you’ll build a picture of whether it’s shifting, whether summers are ending earlier or later for these extraordinary birds. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds’ Swift survey is worth looking at for more information. The Swift Conservation website is also excellent and quite moving if you haven’t visited it before.
In North America, barn swallows and purple martins are similarly beginning to gather and depart. Watching swallows and martins massing on telephone wires in August, restless and chattering before their long journey south, is one of those sights that makes the turning of the year feel very real and very present.
The First Berries and Seeds
August is when the hedgerows start to transform. Elderberries are ripening, turning from green to deep purple-black. Blackberries are coming into fruit, green first, then red, then the glossy black we’re all waiting for. Rowan berries glow orange-red. Hawthorn berries, haws, are swelling and deepening towards their autumn crimson.
This transformation is worth tracking carefully in your journal. Note when each species first shows ripe fruit in your area. Note which species the birds go for first. Warblers and thrushes are already beginning to feed heavily on berries in preparation for migration or the long winter ahead. Blackcaps, in particular, are voracious August berry eaters, fuelling up before their journey south. In North America, wild blueberries, elderberries, and serviceberries are doing the same work, feeding waxwings, thrushes, and tanagers preparing for migration.
There’s something deeply satisfying about tracking the ripening of wild fruit across August. It connects you to a very old human relationship with the seasonal calendar. People have been watching when the blackberries ripen for as long as people have existed in these landscapes.
The Woodland Trust’s page on hedgerow fruit is a useful identification guide. And if you want to do something practical with what you find, Galloway Wild Foods is a wonderful resource on foraging, run by an extremely knowledgeable writer based in Scotland.
Spiders: An Argument for Paying Attention to Something You Might Not Like
August and September are spider season. Garden spiders in particular are suddenly large and visible, sitting in magnificent orb webs strung between plants, fence posts, and anything else that offers an anchor point. In the early morning, when dew has settled on the webs overnight, they are genuinely beautiful objects.
I’ll be honest. I had to talk myself into paying attention to spiders. They’re not everyone’s first choice. But once I started looking properly, I found them completely fascinating. A garden spider sits at the centre of a web that can take less than an hour to construct. The silk is stronger by weight than steel. The spider knows exactly what it has caught by the vibration of the threads.
For identification, the British Arachnological Society has resources for UK readers. In North America, Spider ID is a good community-based identification site. The iNaturalist app works brilliantly for spider photos, too, and the community is usually very helpful with identifications.
Try drawing a spider’s web in your journal this month. It is harder than it looks, and you will learn a lot from the attempt.
Nighttime in August: Meteors and Moths
August brings one of the year’s best meteor showers. The Perseids peak around the 11th and 12th of August every year, and on a clear night away from city lights, you can see dozens of meteors per hour at the peak. The meteors appear to radiate from the constellation Perseus in the northeast sky, though they streak across the whole sky once you’re watching.
Going outside specifically to watch for meteors is a wonderful August journalling exercise. You need to lie on your back, let your eyes adjust to the dark for at least fifteen minutes, and then just watch the sky. Take your journal. Write about what you see. Note the time of each meteor, its brightness, and its direction. Note the other things you notice once your eyes have properly adjusted. The Milky Way, if you’re lucky. Satellites are moving slowly across the sky. The sounds of the night around you.
The Royal Astronomical Society has information about the Perseids and other astronomical events. For North American readers, NASA’s meteor shower guide is a good reference. The Light Pollution Map is useful worldwide for finding the nearest dark sky locations.
As for moths, August nights are still warm and productive. If you haven’t tried leaving a light on near a white sheet yet, this is a good month to try it. Hawk-moths are still flying. The spectacular garden tiger moth, if you’re lucky enough to find one, is one of the most beautiful insects in the UK.
Looking at the Light
I mentioned at the start that August light has a particular quality. I want to spend a bit of time on this because it’s something a journal can capture in a way that photographs sometimes can’t.
The light in August sits lower in the sky than it did in June. By late afternoon, it’s already coming from quite a low angle, casting long shadows and making everything glow from the side. The colour temperature is warmer too, more golden, less the cold bright white of midsummer. Mornings have a clarity to them that feels different from July mornings.
If you’ve been journaling through the year, you already have some light observations to compare this to. Go back and read your June entries. Then write about the August light. Try to find words for the difference. Not just “warmer” or “lower” but something more specific. What does it do to the shadows? What does it do to the colour of the grass or the hedgerows? How does it change the feeling of being outside?
This kind of observation, trying to find language for subtle sensory experiences, is one of the things that genuinely deepens your relationship with the world around you. Robert Macfarlane’s book Landmarks explores the language of landscape in extraordinary depth and is absolutely worth reading for its inspiration.
The Harvest
August is traditionally the height of harvest time in the northern hemisphere. In the UK, combine harvesters work long into the summer evenings, and the smell of cut wheat and straw is one of the most distinctive smells of the month. Fields that were green and full of larks in June are suddenly bare, flat, and golden, then quickly ploughed to dark brown.
This transformation is worth recording in your journal if you live anywhere near farmland. Not just as a description but as a question. What happens to the wildlife when a field is harvested? Where do the skylarks go? What moves into the stubble fields, which can actually be excellent for birds, before ploughing?
The shift in the landscape through August is dramatic and relatively fast. It’s one of those seasonal changes that a journal helps you slow down and actually see, rather than just registering as background noise.
August Journalling Prompts
Take one and give it proper time.
- Note the last date you see or hear a swift this year. Write about the moment you realise they’ve gone. What does that absence feel like?
- Walk a stretch of hedgerow and record every species of berry or fruit you can find. Note which are ripe and which are still green. Come back in two weeks and note what has changed.
- Go outside on the night of the Perseid meteor shower, or any clear August night. Lie on your back. Write about everything you observe, not just the meteors.
- Find a spider’s web with dew on it in the morning. Study it carefully. Try to draw it in your journal. Write about the spider.
- Write about the August light. Compare it to your memory of the June light. What has changed? Try to be specific.
- Visit your chosen patch from the May post. Write a detailed entry about how it has changed since then. What has gone? What is new?
August as a Hinge
What I love most about August in the Nature Journal is that it serves as a hinge. You can look back through your entries from the spring and feel the full arc of the year so far. The snowdrops and frogspawn of February. The migrants arriving in April. The full riot of May. The solstice in June. And then the slow, golden, bittersweet winding down into late summer.
And ahead, if you keep going, lie some of the most dramatic and beautiful months of all. September and October bring migration, fungi, and the extraordinary spectacle of autumn colour. The year is far from over.
August asks you to be present in the fullness of summer while also noticing its ending. That’s not a sad thing. It’s actually a rich and interesting thing to pay attention to. The beauty of things that don’t last is still beauty. Your journal is the place to catch it.
Next month: September, migration in reverse, the first fungi, and the beginning of autumn.
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