So I’ve been keeping nature journals since I was 20 years old when I saw a friend’s journal, and he sort of helped me to get the ropes of it to see how it could be structured. And over time I used to keep writing journals and nature journals separately, but at a certain point I decided to merge it all together because really it’s just who I am. It’s how I live my life. And I get so much inspiration from them that it really is very helpful to have them merged. And they look different ways at different times. Sometimes they’re mostly text, sometimes they’re mostly drawing, A lot of times they’re combinations of the two. And I’m not a good artist. You’ll probably notice I have not illustrated my own books, but that’s not really what a nature journal is about. It’s about capturing what you see, what you observe.
And I often will go back to my nature journals, especially I keep travel nature journals when I go on trips to, I’ve been to places like Africa and the Galapagos Islands, and I am often going back to those nature journals for inspiration, but also for the observations that I’ve made of certain animal behaviors. Because in the nature journal, it’s different from just reading a description that’s in a scientific paper. I can actually, when I read those descriptions, number one, they’re raw and they often have rich language, but also they transport me back to that place and that time, and that helps me to make my writing even more engaging.
