Discover nature journaling ideas, prompts, and tips to help you observe wildlife, seasonal changes, and the natural world throughout the year.
Here we are. December. The last month of the year and, in many ways, the most quietly extraordinary one to write about. If you’ve been keeping a nature journal since January, you now hold something genuinely remarkable in your hands. A record of a whole year. A full turn of the wheel. Every season, every…
November has a reputation problem. People write it off before it’s even begun. Too dark, too cold, too grey, too much like a waiting room for December. And I understand that. I’ve felt it myself. There are November days that seem designed to test your commitment to being outside. But here’s what I’ve discovered, partly…
I’ve been waiting to write this one. October is, for my money, the most visually spectacular month of the entire year. Not the most abundant, not the most dramatic in terms of wildlife events, but the most purely, overwhelmingly beautiful. The light. The colour. The smell of damp leaves and woodsmoke, and something ancient and…
There’s a morning in September, and you can never quite predict when it will come, when you step outside, and the air smells different. Not summer anymore. Something cooler and slightly damp underneath the warmth. A suggestion of leaf mould and morning mist. And you think: oh. There it is. Autumn. It doesn’t arrive all…
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…
July is the month when nature journaling gets genuinely interesting in a different kind of way. Not because there’s less to see. There’s still plenty. But because the dramatic firsts of spring are behind us now. The migrants have arrived, nested, and are quietly getting on with things. The blossom is long gone. The dawn…
There’s something strange about June that I didn’t really understand until I started keeping a nature journal. It’s the month that feels most like summer. The longest days. The warmest evenings. Gardens full of roses and bees. And yet, if you’re paying close attention, you start to notice something quietly unsettling underneath all that abundance….
May is the month that nature journallers talk about in slightly hushed, reverent tones. It’s the one where everything comes together at once. The migrants are all here. The trees are in full leaf. The wildflowers are rioting. The insects are everywhere. And the dawn chorus, on a good morning, is so layered and complex…
There’s a moment in April that I look forward to all year. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it happens, but one day you go outside, and the world is suddenly, unmistakably, fully green. Not the tentative green of March. Proper green. Layers of it. And the air smells different. Everything is loud with birds….
Here’s the thing about March. You wait and wait through January and February, peering at the ground for signs of life, and then suddenly March arrives, and absolutely everything happens at the same time. Blossom. Birdsong. Frogs. Butterflies. The first bumblebee. Baby lambs, if you live anywhere near farmland. It can feel genuinely overwhelming if…