September Nature Journaling: How To Mark the Breath of Autumn
The Calendar Year may get paid commission for purchases made after clicking a link on this page. This website is for inspiration purposes only. The content provided is meant to spark creativity and ideas, not to serve as professional advice or as endorsement.
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 at once, of course. September is a month of two halves, and sometimes three. Early September can feel like the best of summer, warm and golden and unhurried. Then something shifts, usually around the middle of the month, and the light changes and the mornings get shorter, and you start to feel the year tilting.
For a nature journaler, September is one of the most rewarding months of the whole year. The visible drama of spring is matched by a quieter, richer, more complex drama in autumn. And so much of it goes unnoticed by people who aren’t paying attention.
This month, I want to talk about migration running in reverse, about the sudden appearance of fungi, and about the way September rewards the kind of patient, observant attention we’ve been practising all year.
Migration in Reverse
In April, we talked about the excitement of migrants arriving from Africa and Central America. September is when the story runs the other way. The swallows and house martins that have been feeding over our fields and gardens all summer are gathering on wires, restless and chattering, preparing for the extraordinary journey south.
Watch a group of swallows on a telegraph wire in early September. They shuffle and preen and fly short circuits and come back. They seem unable to settle. There’s a quality of barely contained urgency about them that is one of the most moving things the natural world offers. Note the date when you first see them gathering. Note when the last one disappears.
At the same time, birds are moving in the other direction. Species that breed in the Arctic tundra and northern forests are heading south and passing through our landscapes on their way to warmer wintering grounds. Redwings and fieldfares begin to arrive in the UK from Scandinavia in September, often heard first as thin, high-pitched contact calls overhead on clear nights. In North America, the warbler migration runs in reverse, and September brings waves of birds moving south through parks and gardens.
The BTO’s migration pages have fascinating information about how these journeys are tracked and studied. And BirdCast remains excellent for North American readers wanting to follow migration movements in real time.
Fungi: The Hidden Kingdom Reveals Itself
If there is one thing that defines September for me as a nature journaller, it is fungi. After months of largely invisible underground activity, September is when the fruiting bodies of hundreds of species suddenly push up through soil, leaf litter, and rotting wood. And the variety, once you start looking, is genuinely staggering.
Fungi are not plants. They are not animals. They belong to their own kingdom entirely, and they play a role in ecosystems that science is only beginning to fully understand. The underground mycelial networks that connect trees in a wood, sharing nutrients and chemical signals, have been described as a kind of forest internet. Merlin Sheldrake’s book Entangled Life is absolutely the place to start if you want to understand more. It is one of the most mind-expanding books I’ve read, and it will change how you look at every woodland floor you ever walk across.
For identification, the First Nature fungi identification guide is comprehensive and free online. The British Mycological Society runs forays and has recording schemes for UK readers. For North America, Mushroom Observer is a superb citizen science community where you can submit photos for identification and contribute to a global database.
A word of caution. Fungi identification for eating requires expert knowledge and should not be attempted from photographs alone. For your journal, the goal is observation and identification, not foraging. Look, photograph, draw, describe. Leave the eating to people who know what they’re doing.
What to Look For in September
Beyond migrants and fungi, September is rich in things worth noticing and recording.
Autumn colour:
is beginning. The first trees to turn are usually those under stress, shallow-rooted, or on dry or exposed sites. Horse chestnuts often go early, their leaves developing brown patches and falling before any real colour develops. Then come the wild cherries, which can turn a brilliant red-orange. The main show is still a few weeks away, but it begins in September. Note the first turning leaves you see, with the date and species, if you can identify them.
Ivy flowering:
Ivy flowers in September and October, and it is one of the most important late-season nectar sources in the UK landscape. A flowering ivy on a warm September afternoon will be absolutely covered in insects. Red admiral butterflies, ivy bees, hoverflies, and common wasps. It is worth finding a good ivy patch and sitting with it for twenty minutes. You will be amazed at what you find. The Ivy Bee is a relatively recent colonist in the UK from southern Europe and is worth looking out for.
Berries at their peak:
Everything we noted beginning in August is now at full ripeness. Blackberries, sloes, haws, rowan, elder, and guelder rose. Hedgerows are extraordinary in September if you take the time to look at them properly. The reds, blacks, and deep purples are genuinely beautiful against the still-green leaves.
The deer rutting begins:
In parts of the UK with red and fallow deer, the rut begins in late September or early October. The sound of stags roaring in a valley on a misty October morning is one of the great wildlife experiences of these islands. September is a good time to start visiting places where you know deer are present, before the rut peaks. The British Deer Society has information about deer species and where to find them.
Crane flies and harvestmen:
Two creatures that September seems to produce in abundance, and both are worth looking at more carefully than most people do. Harvestmen, those long-legged creatures often mistaken for spiders, are fascinating on close inspection. They have only two eyes, no silk glands, and no venom. They are ancient creatures, little changed in 400 million years. Slow down and look at one properly.
Mists and Morning Light
September mornings have a quality that is unlike any other time of year. When the warm days are followed by cooler nights, mist forms in valleys, over rivers, and across low-lying fields. And the low morning light catching that mist, with spiders’ webs jewelled with dew and the first autumn colours just beginning in the hedgerow, is one of the most beautiful things the year offers.
This is worth making an effort for. Set an alarm. Get outside early on a misty September morning with your journal. You don’t need to be in the countryside. A park, a canal, a riverside path will do. Write about what you see. Describe the mist, the light. Describe the transition as the sun rises and the mist burns off.
These atmospheric entries are often the ones you’ll value most when you read your journal back in winter. They capture something about the particular quality of a moment that no photograph quite manages.
Blackberrying as a Journalling Practice
I want to make a gentle argument for blackberrying this month. Not just as a pleasant activity, but as a way into nature journaling for people who find the blank page intimidating.
Going to pick blackberries forces you to move slowly. To look carefully at the hedge. To notice what else is there. While you’re picking, you might see a red admiral butterfly feeding on the same berries. A wren scolding from deep in the brambles. The way the light falls through the gap in the hedge onto a dew-covered spider’s web.
Afterwards, write about where you went and what you noticed. Not just the blackberries. Everything. The smell of the brambles. The sound of traffic, birdsong, or wind. The colour of the sky. The physical sensation of being outside on a September afternoon.
That’s a nature journal entry. It really is that simple. And it’s connected to a human activity that goes back as long as humans have been in these landscapes.
For those interested in the wider tradition of foraging and seasonal living, The Forager’s Harvest by Samuel Thayer is a classic American guide. In the UK, Food for Free by Richard Mabey, first published in 1972, remains the definitive text.
September Journaling Prompts
One at a time. Sit with it properly.
- Watch a group of swallows or house martins gathering. Write about what they’re doing. How do they move? What do they sound like? Note the date.
- Find a fungus and describe it in as much detail as you can. Shape, colour, texture, smell, substrate, surroundings. Photograph it and try to identify it using an online guide or iNaturalist.
- Get outside early on a misty morning and write your journal entry in real time. Try to capture the light and the atmosphere of the moment.
- Find a patch of flowering ivy and sit with it for twenty minutes. List every species you see visiting it.
- Walk a stretch of hedgerow and record every berry-bearing species you can find. Note which are ripe and which birds or animals are feeding on them.
- Write about the moment you first noticed autumn this year. Where were you? What was it that made you realise the season had shifted?
The Long Exhale
September feels to me like the year taking a long, slow exhale. The held breath of summer, the heat and the abundance and the long light, is being let go. Something is settling. Something is preparing.
If you’ve been keeping a journal since January, or even since March or April, take some time this month to read back through what you’ve written. It’s a remarkable thing to do. You’ll be surprised how much you notice, and how much the record brings back that you’d completely forgotten. The date the first chiffchaff called. The morning the bluebells peaked. In the evening, the swifts were screaming over the rooftops.
Those moments are still there, in the pages. September is a good time to remember that’s what you’re building. Not just a record of what you saw, but a record of being present through a whole year. That is, I think, a quietly remarkable thing.
Next month: October, the full fire of autumn colour, and why this might be the most beautiful month of all.
Useful links mentioned in this post:
