Duncan Reid
Why a nature journal suits the Scottish year
A Scottish year rarely arrives in the tidy seasons the postcards promise. Snow can fall in April, a February afternoon can feel like June, and the first cuckoo may call a fortnight earlier than last year. That is exactly why keeping a journal repays you. You are not trying to produce a beautiful book; you are building a private calendar of what happens where you live, written down while your hands are still cold.
Keep your entries small and boringly consistent. Date, time, place, and then the bare facts: wind direction, cloud cover, whether the rain is a smirr or a downpour. Add what is in flower, in leaf, in song. Note the first and last of things — first frogspawn, last swift, first hard frost. After two or three years you will be able to look up a date and know what the hazel was doing, and whether the rowan berries came early.
What to carry, and how to press a leaf that lasts
You need less than you think. A tough A5 notebook that survives a pocket, a pencil that works in the wet, a waterproof pen for labels, and a small tin for anything you collect. A phone for the odd photograph is useful, but sketch before you snap — a rough outline of a leaf shape teaches you more than a hundred perfect images.
- Only collect fallen material, never leaves or flowers pulled from a growing plant, and leave the rare things alone.
- Lay each leaf between two sheets of newspaper, sandwich that between card, and weigh it down with books.
- Change the paper after two days if the leaf is damp, and again a week later. Drying on a radiator makes them brittle and curled.
- Leave for two to four weeks, then mount with thin strips of gummed tape or a tiny dab of glue, and label with date, place, species and the weather that day.
Spring: frogspawn, willow warblers and the first whin blossom
Spring begins quietly, often under grey skies. Hazel catkins hang like lamb's tails in January, and by February the whin is blazing yellow on the roadside with that coconut smell. Frogspawn appears in shallow lochans and slow ditches, a good thing to draw a rough map of — count the clumps and come back weekly to watch the tadpoles. Wood anemone, wood sorrel and lesser celandine open in the old woods, often before the birch has leafed.
The birds arrive in a rush. Willow warblers and cuckoos from late April, swifts screaming over the town in early May. Note the exact day. Folklore around the first cuckoo is worth recording too: the old quarter days, the rowan leafing, and the saying about not casting a clout until the May blossom is out. These are not forecasts, but they are the way people here have read the year for centuries.
Summer: long light, midges and the hush of the glens
Midsummer light changes how you record things. In the far north it barely goes dark, and a ten o'clock walk may be the best of the day. Now the details are cotton grass on the bog, tormentil and heather buds, damselflies on peaty pools, sea pinks on the coast. Swifts chase and feed; bats flicker at dusk.
Write down the midges, too — the wind, the hour, whether they eased after rain. It sounds trivial, but it is real data about your own patch, and rereading it in January is unexpectedly funny. Record flowering dates for the heather, the first ripe blaeberry, the day the burn ran low.
Autumn: rowan berries, brambles and the arrival of the redwings
Autumn is the richest season for a journal because so much arrives and so much leaves. Rowan berries redden, brambles ripen in the hedges, the birch woods of Deeside and Perthshire turn gold, and larch goes amber before it drops. Redwings from Scandinavia and whooper swans from Iceland come in during October; listen for the swans calling at night. Stags roar on the hill.
This is the season to press things. Rowan, birch, oak, beech and oak-gall leaves all press well; so do grasses if you catch them before they go to seed. Keep a running list of first and last dates — last swallow, first frost, first redwing. That list is the spine of your calendar.
Winter: frost, footprints and reading the year back
Winter is quieter, but the page should not be blank. Snow and hard frost turn the ground into a record of who has been past: hare, fox, roe deer, otter sliding towards the burn. Dippers sing on fast water; ptarmigan turn white on the high ground. Hazel catkins reappear in January and snowdrops push up in sheltered gardens by early February, so the year has already begun again.
Use the dark evenings to sort the year's pressed leaves, write up loose notes and make a simple index by month and species. Ten minutes with a flask of tea is enough. Then, when the first willow warbler sings next spring, you will know precisely how it compares — and that is slow outdoor living at its best: not grand, just attentive. Over the years, the small changes you notice will add up to something no weather report can give you.
