December Nature Journaling: How To Record The Full Circle
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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 transition, every first and last sighting of the year, written down in your own words.
Take a moment with that before we go any further. Because what you’ve built is not a small thing.
December is also, of course, the month where the year bottoms out. The days reach their shortest. The light is at its most scarce. The natural world is at its quietest. And yet, something is happening, even now. There always is. And if you’ve been paying attention all year, you’re well placed to see it.
This final post is partly about December itself, with its particular beauty and its particular challenges. And partly it’s about what it means to have completed a full year of noticing. What that practice has given you, and what you might carry forward into the year ahead.
December Light
If there is one thing that defines December for the nature journaller, it is the quality of the light. On the days when the sun appears at all, it is extraordinarily low in the sky. At midday in the UK, it barely clears the rooftops. In Scotland, it rises only a few degrees above the horizon even at its peak. And that low angle produces light unlike anything the rest of the year offers.
Everything is lit from the side. Shadows are long even at noon. Frost and dew catch the light at angles that make them sparkle. Bare tree branches become intricate gold filigree against a pale sky. A simple hedgerow in December afternoon sunlight can be one of the most beautiful things you’ve ever seen, if you’re in the right frame of mind to look at it.
Go out on a sunny December day specifically for the light. Not to see wildlife, not to find fungi or identify birds, just to look at what the light is doing to the landscape. Bring your journal. Try to find words for it. That quality of gold and cold and long shadow. It is one of the year’s great gifts, and it only comes now.
The timeanddate.com tool you might have bookmarked back in February is worth revisiting this month. Look up your local sunrise and sunset times and compare them to those at the summer solstice. The difference is a physical fact that reading about doesn’t prepare you for until you’ve lived through it with a journal in hand.
The Winter Solstice
The solstice falls around the 21st of December. The shortest day. The longest night. And, crucially, the turning point. From the solstice onwards, the days begin to lengthen again. Imperceptibly at first. But the direction of travel has changed.
Humans have marked this moment for as long as we have been human. Newgrange in County Meath, Ireland, is a Neolithic passage tomb built around 3200 BCE, predating Stonehenge by several centuries. At dawn on the winter solstice, a shaft of sunlight enters the long passage and illuminates the inner chamber. People have been watching for that light for five thousand years. You can read more about it and even enter a lottery to be present at the solstice dawn at the Newgrange website.
In Scandinavia, St Lucia Day on the 13th of December celebrates the return of light. Many Indigenous North American traditions say the winter solstice is a time of ceremony and reflection. In Iran, Yalda Night on the 21st of December is one of the most important celebrations of the year, marking the longest night with family gatherings, poetry, and pomegranates.
Your journal entry on the solstice is one of the most important of the year. Go back and read what you wrote on the summer solstice in June. Then write the winter counterpart. The same commitment to noticing, attention to where the sun rises and sets. The same record of what is alive and what is sleeping. Together, those two entries form something like the spine of the year’s journal.
What December Actually Offers
It is less than May or October, it’s true. But it is nothing. Far from it.
Redwings and fieldfares are still moving through, sometimes in large flocks that pour over the tops of hedgerows and settle briefly in berry-laden trees before moving on. On hard frost days, they can be desperate for food and may come into gardens. Leave out windfall apples if you have them.
Robins are at their most territorial and vocal in December. Their song on a cold, clear morning is one of the most evocative sounds in the British countryside. They sing throughout the winter to defend feeding territories, both males and females. In North America, the hermit thrush plays a similar role; its fluting, spiralling song is one of the great sounds of the winter woodland.
Geese are spectacular this month. Pink-footed and barnacle geese in the UK. Canada, snow, and cackling geese across North America. Seeing skeins of geese moving across a winter sky, hearing their calls coming down from the grey, is one of those experiences that connects you to something much larger than your own life. The WWT has excellent information on where to watch goose spectacles in the UK.
Holly and ivy are the classic December plants for good reason. Holly berries are at their most vivid now and are important food for winter thrushes. Look closely at a holly tree, and you’ll notice that male and female plants look slightly different. Only female plants produce berries. The heavily berried trees are the ones the fieldfare go for first.
Winter skies. December gives you more dark sky than any other month. On clear nights, away from light pollution, the winter constellations are magnificent. Orion rises in the east and dominates the winter sky. The Pleiades cluster is high overhead. Jupiter and Saturn may be visible depending on the year. This is worth noting in your journal alongside the wildlife observations. The night sky is part of the natural world, too.
Looking Back: Reading the Year
Sometime this December, set aside an hour or two and read your journal from the beginning. All of it, if you can. Start with January and work through to now.
I think this is one of the most valuable things you can do with the record you’ve built. Not to evaluate it or judge it, but simply to experience what it feels like to have a year in your hands. To remember the specific morning you noted the first chiffchaff. The afternoon you found the first frogspawn. The evening you watched the swifts arrive. The day in October you wrote about the beech tree turning copper.
These moments are still there, all of them, in the pages. And reading them back in December has a particular quality. You’ve lived through the whole arc now. You can feel the shape of the year in a way that’s impossible from inside it.
Notice too how your writing has changed. Most people find that their entries get richer and more detailed as the year goes on. The things they notice have multiplied. The names they can put to things have accumulated. The quality of attention has deepened. That’s real. That’s what the practice does.
What You Carry Forward
Here’s something I’ve been thinking about as I write this final post in the series. Nature journaling isn’t really about the journal. The journal is just the tool. What the practice is actually about is developing a certain quality of attention. A habit of noticing. A relationship with the world around you that is specific, detailed, and ongoing.
That quality of attention doesn’t stay in the notebook. It comes with you. It changes how you move through the world. After a year of this practice, you can’t walk past a hedgerow without reading it a little. You can’t hear a bird without wondering which one it is. You can’t feel the quality of the light on a December afternoon without knowing, somewhere in your bones, that it is the shortest days now and the year is about to turn.
That knowledge, that embodied familiarity with the rhythms of the natural world, is something that no screen, no documentary, no wildlife programme can give you. It comes only from repeated, attentive, personal contact with the world outside your door.
The naturalist and writer Aldo Leopold, whose book A Sand County Almanac is one of the founding texts of environmental writing, described this kind of attention as thinking like a mountain. A patience and a wideness of perspective that comes from long, deep engagement with a place. You can find out more about his work and legacy at the Aldo Leopold Foundation.
A Few Things to Do in December
Beyond the prompts below, here are a few December-specific suggestions.
Buy a new journal for next year before this one ends. Have it ready. The continuity matters. And if you can, choose a slightly better one than last year’s. You’ve earned it.
Consider submitting some of your sightings to citizen science platforms like iNaturalist or eBird if you haven’t already. The records you’ve been building have real value beyond the personal.
And think about what you want to pay particular attention to next year. Is there a species group you’ve mostly ignored? Lichens? Hoverflies? Grasses? A habitat you haven’t explored properly? Use the end of this year to set a small, specific intention for the next one.
December Journalling Prompts
The last set of the year. Make them count.
- Go outside on the solstice. Be there at both dawn and dusk if you can. Write a full journal entry about the shortest day. Read back your entry from the summer solstice in June and write the winter counterpart alongside it.
- On a sunny December day, go out specifically for the light. Not for wildlife, not for exercise. Just for the quality of the light. Write about what you find.
- Find a holly tree and spend ten minutes with it. Describe the berries, the leaves, the insects or birds using it. Is it a male or female tree?
- Go outside after dark on a clear night and look at the sky for twenty minutes. Write about what you see.
- Read your journal from January through to now. Then write a December entry that reflects on the full year. What were the moments that surprised you most? What have you learned to see that you couldn’t see before?
- Write a letter to yourself to read at the start of next year. What do you want to notice next time around? What do you want to do differently?
The Year Turns
The solstice comes. The shortest day passes. And almost immediately, almost imperceptibly, the days begin to lengthen again. By the end of December, you can already feel it if you’re paying attention. The light is coming back.
And somewhere in the bare hedgerows, the hazel is already forming next year’s catkins. Under the cold soil, the snowdrops are already there, waiting. The robins are singing in the dark. The redwings are roosting in the ivy.
The natural world doesn’t stop. It doesn’t wait for a convenient moment. It just keeps going, season into season, year into year, whether we’re watching or not.
The difference, after a year with a nature journal, is that you’re watching. You’re part of it in a way you weren’t before. And when January comes around again, you’ll go out with your notebook on a cold, grey morning, and you’ll know what to look for. You’ll know what the bare trees mean and what the robin’s song is for and what lies underneath the frozen ground.
That knowledge is yours now. It lives in the journal and in you.
Happy New Year. See you outside.
Thank you for following this series throughout the year. If you’ve been keeping a nature journal alongside these posts, I’d love to hear what you’ve discovered. And if you’re just starting out, January is always the right time to begin.
Useful links mentioned in this post:
