We live in a busy world. And as the choices for sending and receiving communications increase (from cell phones to Internet web logs to e-mail), time available dwindles by the day, and life seems busier than ever. So a rather quaint activity such as writing a journal in a mere notebook may seem antiquated and not quite worth the trouble. One may even feel there is little worth recording on a day-to-day basis.
As a child, even Mark Twain became discouraged when attempting to keep a daily journal. Each day he would faithfully write, "Got up, washed, went to bed." After a few weeks, though, the writing ended, with Twain remarking that "Startling events appeared to be too rare in my career to render a diary necessary." But surely he must have had some unrecorded reactions to events happening in the world around him, in between washing and going to bed. He should have looked beyond himself, and years later, might have been surprised to find interest in reading those impressions. Following this article, perhaps the reader may find that the world around us offers an endless variety of events worth recording or providing commentary upon. Nature, in fact, is a good place to start.
Over the years, I have noticed that keeping records comes naturally and spontaneously to birders. Even beginning birders can be seen keeping a list of birds seen on a field trip, usually without any prodding from the trip leader. Though recording an occasional bird list may not qualify as keeping a journal, it is a start in the process of carefully witnessing one’s surroundings. And who knows where this may lead.
A bird list means little, though, if it is done haphazardly and then filed in a drawer to never be seen again. Lists should be made with the intention of eventually reviewing them to look for patterns and inconsistencies or submitting the list to the proper ornithological organization. By reviewing lists collected over a long period of time, one may be able to observe trends such as increases in populations of some species and declines in others. Or one might note that certain species are arriving from their winter or summer grounds earlier or later than usual.
For many migratory species, it is remarkable how close from year to year they follow certain behavioral patterns. For example, from reviewing my notes, I know that barn swallows tend to arrive from South America at their nest under my porch roof in central Illinois about April 15, more or less. When the birds are much later, I begin wondering whether they may have been killed in a hurricane or met some other disaster on their very dangerous route to a dangerous place. Another example is the day on which I first hear a house wren singing, which for the last three years was April 12, April 15, and April 11. These are benchmarks in time on nature’s calender. And I have noticed many other benchmarks in relation to birds, such as the first days in July when I begin seeing southward-moving shorebirds; the loose September flocks of nighthawks foraging in the skies, but seriously bound for the Amazon basin and beyond; the first late fall day when the waters of the local marsh freeze over and all the waterfowl leave; the first red-winged blackbird song in February. Journal writing and taking notice of specific events have brought me closer to nature and have enriched my life.
Today’s easy-to-use home computers and the Internet have brought record keeping to a new level. At the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology’s eBird web site (www.ebird.org), data from your birding lists may be entered into a giant database that is used by birders and scientists across North America to track bird populations over space and time. The easy flexibility of their system allows even a casual observation to be entered. There is even room for special notes related to the bird observations.
Taking careful notes on bird behavior is where a simple bird list becomes a birding journal. As a beginning birder soon discovers, certain species tend to be associated with specific habitats. So the bird observation and what specifically exists at the siting location are highly correlated. Habitat factors include the type and structure of the vegetation, topographical relief, presence or absence of water, amount of standing dead timber, available food resources, and acreage. By keeping notes on these factors and relating that to where specific birds were observed, one can learn to read the landscape and know what birds to expect.
A birding journal should also record weather conditions at the time of observation as well as notes on bird behavior as they interact with each other, other organisms, and the environment. Yet with such information, the birding journal may be more accurately called a nature journal. Topics may then appropriately include information such as the flowering date of specific plants or the date when a local river crests in its spring flood. And once one becomes accustomed to journal writing about nature, it is only too easy to include comments on whatever events happen to be worth noticing, perhaps even arcane philosophical ruminations on the human condition.
Journal writing will enhance the enjoyment of any trip, long or short. It can provide a record of events unique to the writer. When shared with another person, who is also recording the same day’s events, journal writing can provide a special, simple, and personal kind of entertainment and insight into the trip. For example, on a trip to the upper Mississippi River, each evening my wife Julie and I described the day’s events in our journals. The next morning over breakfast, we each read our journal entries aloud. Part of one afternoon in Wisconsin was recorded in this way:
From T. V. Lerczak’s journal: From Julie’s journal:
On this two-week trip, we never watched television once, which I think says quite a lot in favor of journal writing.
Mississippi River near Quincy, Illinois
Making the transition from simple bird listing to keeping a nature or trip journal is significant. Yet even if one is seriously keeping a journal, making daily entries may probably require establishing a forced routine; that is, purposely setting aside a block of time to write. Most folks aspiring to write, indeed, say that writing every day is important. But what if truly nothing has happened worth recording? Once you are beginning to write "got up, washed, went to bed," is it time to admit defeat? Here the journal writer must mine his or her thoughts for perhaps one inspired conclusion or one past observation worth committing to paper. Even Edwin Way Teale must have had his uneventful days once in a while, for his entire June 11 journal entry in Circle of the Seasons: The Journal of a Naturalist’s Year reads as follows: "Out-of-doors, adventures are everywhere. Wonders are all around us. If the world is stale, its fascination gone, the fault, we find, is in ourselves. As G.K. Chesterton put it: ‘The world will never starve for want of wonders, but only for want of wonder.’"
NOTE: This essay originally appeared in the Summer 2006 issue of Illinois Audubon magazine.
