November Nature Journaling: How To Find Hidden Beauty
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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 through keeping a nature journal and partly through stubbornly going out anyway. November is one of the most interesting months of the year for anyone willing to pay close attention. It’s just that its beauty is quieter. More stripped back. Less immediately obvious than the riot of May or the fire of October.
November asks something of you. It asks you to look harder. To find the interest in what looks, at first glance, like an absence. And when you do, the rewards are genuine and sometimes surprising.
This is the penultimate post in this year-long series. And in some ways, November feels like the right place to reflect on what this whole practice is actually for. Because November, more than any other month, is where fair-weather attention falls away. The people who are still going outside with a notebook in November are the ones who have genuinely understood something about what it means to pay attention to the world all year round.
The Architecture of Bare Trees
We touched on this back in January, right at the start of the series. But November is when it becomes truly visible. The last leaves are falling or have fallen. The trees are showing their full structure. And that structure, once you start looking at it properly, is one of the most beautiful things the winter landscape offers.
Every species has a distinctive silhouette. Oaks have a broad, irregular, somewhat rugged outline, their branches twisting and dividing in complex patterns. Ashes are more upright, with elegant opposite branching and distinctive black buds. Beeches have smooth grey bark and a graceful, slightly drooping outer canopy. Elms, where they still exist, have a dense, rounded crown. Hornbeams have a slightly fluted trunk, as if the wood is being squeezed.
Learning to recognise trees by their winter silhouette is one of the most satisfying slow skills a nature journaller can develop. It takes time and repeated observation. But once you have it, you can never quite unsee it. Every winter landscape becomes legible in a new way.
Try sketching silhouettes this month rather than close-up details. Stand back from a tree and draw just the outline. The shape against the sky. Compare different species. Notice how much information is contained in that outline alone.
The Woodland Trust’s winter tree ID guide is a helpful resource for UK readers. The Arbor Day Foundation remains a good tree identification tool for North American readers.
Winter Thrushes and Arriving Birds
November brings some of the best birdwatching of the year, though it’s quieter and more subtle than the spring spectacle. The redwings and fieldfares that began arriving in September are now well established, moving through hedgerows and fields in often large, noisy flocks. Fieldfares in particular are striking birds, large and confident, their chattering calls carrying across winter fields.
Woodcock begin arriving on our eastern coasts from Scandinavia in October and November, filtering inland to wet woodland and scrub. They are secretive and beautifully camouflaged, but occasionally seen at dusk moving between feeding and roosting areas. Finding a woodcock is one of those November rewards that feels disproportionately exciting.
Along coasts and estuaries, waders and wildfowl are building up on their wintering grounds. November is an excellent month for estuary birdwatching. The combination of light, movement, and sheer numbers of birds can be spectacular, particularly at high tide when waders are pushed off the mudflats and gather in packed roosts on the shore.
The WWT Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust has excellent sites across the UK, and their visitor centres are particularly good in November. For North American readers, waterfowl migration is at its peak in November. The Ducks Unlimited wetlands finder can help locate good spots near you.
The Last Fungi and the Woodland Floor
The main fungi season is winding down, but November still has surprises. Velvet shanks, the species we mentioned briefly back in January, come into their own now. They fruit on dead wood through autumn and winter, sometimes even through frost and snow, their warm orange-brown caps glowing against the grey November wood. They’re one of the few species that genuinely thrive in cold conditions.
Jelly fungi, brackets, and various crust fungi continue through the winter months and are worth looking for on fallen logs and dead branches. November woodland floors also reward close attention for other reasons. Without the visual competition of flowers and green leaves, you start to see structure. The way roots ridge and twist across the ground. The different textures of leaf litter from different tree species. The way light falls differently through the bare canopy.
This is also a good month to look at mosses and lichens in detail again. We mentioned them in January and February, but the November light has a quality that makes the green of mosses particularly vivid against the brown and grey of the woodland floor. Get low. Look closely. There’s a whole landscape down there.
The British Lichen Society has identification resources if you want to go deeper. The Lichen Portal covers North American species.
Bonfire Night, Diwali, and the Human Relationship With Light
November contains two of the most fire-lit celebrations in the UK calendar. Bonfire Night on the 5th of November marks the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, falls in October or November, depending on the lunar calendar. Both involve fire and light in the darkness, and both connect to something very deep in the human relationship with the darkening year.
Across the world, cultures have found ways to mark the descent into the darkest part of the year with light. It’s worth sitting with that thought in your journal this November. The shortening days are a fact of astronomy, but the human response to them, the insistence on making light in the darkness, is something else entirely.
If you go to a bonfire or a fireworks display this month, take your journal. Not to write during the display, necessarily, but afterwards. Write about the light against the dark sky. The smell of woodsmoke. The sound of the crowd, then the silence that followed. These sensory experiences, placed in a nature journal alongside the fieldfare in the hedgerow and the velvet shank on the log, make for a richer and more human record than a purely wildlife-focused journal ever could.
Embracing the Grey Days
I want to be honest about November. Some days are just grey. Flat, damp, colourless, and uninspiring. And on those days, the nature journal practice can feel like a duty rather than a pleasure.
I think this is worth acknowledging rather than papering over with enthusiasm. Not every day outside is revelatory. Some days you go out, look around, notice a few things, and come home cold and slightly damp, wondering what you’re doing.
But here’s what I’ve found. Those grey, uninspired entries often turn out to be the most honest ones. The ones that capture the actual texture of the season rather than the highlights. And when you read them back later, they have a quality that the triumphant entries don’t. They’re quieter. More reflective. They capture the mood of the month rather than just the events.
There’s also this. The habit of going out and noticing, even on the grey days, is what makes you a person who notices things. It’s not the spectacular moments that build the practice. It’s the ordinary ones, the ones where nothing much happens, repeated enough times that attention becomes second nature.
The writer and naturalist Richard Mabey has written beautifully about this kind of patient, unspectacular attention to the natural world throughout his career. His book Nature Cure, about recovering from depression partly through re-engagement with the natural world, is one of the most honest and moving accounts of what paying attention to nature can actually do for a person. It’s particularly appropriate reading for November.
November Journalling Prompts
One at a time. Don’t rush.
- Find a bare tree and spend twenty minutes sketching just its silhouette. The whole outline against the sky. Then write a description of its character. What does its shape tell you about it?
- Go birdwatching at an estuary, reservoir, or wetland this month. Write about what you find. Focus on numbers, movement, and behaviour rather than just species lists.
- Walk in the woodland and look specifically at the floor. The structure of roots, the different textures of leaf litter, the mosses and lichens. Write about what you find down there.
- Write a November entry that is deliberately about a grey, unremarkable day. Try to find the interest in the ordinary.
- If you go to a bonfire, fireworks display, or any celebration with fire or light this month, write about it in your journal alongside your nature observations. How does human celebration connect to the season?
- Write about the quality of the light this month. How is it different from October? From June? Try to find specific words for the particular grey-and-gold quality of November light.
Eleven Months In
If you’ve been journaling since January, you now have nearly a full year of records. That’s a remarkable thing. Go back and read the January entry. Read the February one. Read the March one where you first noted the chiffchaff or the first frogspawn.
Notice how much you’ve developed as an observer. Notice the things you’re looking at now that you would have walked past in January. Notice how the names of things, the grasses, the fungi, the winter thrushes, have accumulated quietly across the year until they’re part of how you see the world.
That’s what this practice does, slowly and almost without you noticing. It makes you someone who pays attention. Someone who knows their place across the turning year. Someone who can feel the difference between November light and October light, between the smell of May and the smell of September, between a world that is waking up and a world that is settling towards sleep.
One more month to go. And then the year turns again.
Next month: December, the winter solstice, and what it means to complete a full year of paying attention.
Useful links mentioned in this post:
