How to Start a Forest Journal: A Beginner's Guide to Recording What You See

The first entry is usually the hardest. You sit down on a mossy log, open a blank notebook, and realise you have no idea what to write. The wood is doing so much at once — light sliding through the canopy, a wren scolding from the undergrowth, three kinds of moss on a single stone — that "I went for a walk" feels like a small betrayal of the afternoon.

It isn't. A forest journal is not a field guide, a diary, or a piece of art. It is a record of attention, kept in your own hand, and the only standard it has to meet is that you can open it later and remember something specific.

Start With the Boring Details

Before anything else, fix the entry in time and place. Date, the hour you arrived, the hour you left. The name of the wood, or the nearest village, or a plain description of the trackhead if the place has no name. Weather written properly: not "nice", but "grey, still, around nine degrees, drizzle at four". Who you were with, and whether you were in a hurry.

These lines look dull in the notebook and become the most valuable thing in it two years later. "Oaks in leaf" means little on its own. "Oaks in leaf, 12 April, track above the stream" means a great deal once you have a second spring to compare it with. Without a date and an hour, an observation is just an impression.

Add one line about your own state: tired, restless, unusually calm, distracted by something at home. It explains a lot about what you noticed and what you walked straight past.

What to Record: Four Kinds of Notes

You do not need to catch everything. Three or four things described properly will do more for you than a list of twenty species. Specificity is the whole craft: not "lots of birdsong", but "a great tit repeating the same two notes from the same holly bush for ten minutes". Not "mossy", but "a fist-sized moss cushion on the shaded side of the beech, holding water like a sponge".

• What you see. Leaf shape, bark texture, the way a branch forks. Whether the bracken is still croziers or already flat and brown. Colours, but also sizes and positions: chest height, waist height, on the dry side of the ditch.
• What you hear. Birdsong is hard to describe and worth trying anyway. Rhythm, pitch, repetition, distance. "One clear note, then four quick ones, far off to the left" is a usable note.
• Signs that something was there. A nibbled pine cone, a feather, a run through the grass, hoofprints in soft mud, a hole in a hazel nut. Signs are often the only wildlife a quiet walker gets.
• What has changed since last time. This is the heart of a journal. The same walk, week after week, teaches you more than a new place every weekend.
• What you don't know. Write the question down. "What is the small white flower on the bank?" A question in the notebook sends you home to the field guide with a purpose.

Resist the urge to identify everything on the spot. Getting the name is satisfying; getting the description is what makes the entry useful. You can add the name later, in a different pen, once you have checked it.

How to Structure a Single Entry

A repeating shape saves you from staring at the page. It also makes old entries easy to scan. Try this one for the first month:

1. Heading. Date, time, place, weather — three lines, written in seconds.
2. The walk itself. Six to ten lines in order of the route, so the notebook reads the way the afternoon went.
3. One thing in detail. A single subject written properly: a fallen branch, a puddle, a patch of sorrel, a stump. Half a page is plenty.
4. A sketch or a rubbing. Small, quick, unbothered by quality.
5. A question and a note to self. What to look for next time, what to check in a book.

Written out, a plain entry looks like this:

Sat 5 Oct, 3.10–5.00pm. Crag wood, lower path. Still, damp, sun after rain. Alone, slow.
Beech mast everywhere on the path, husks split open like little stars. Two jays moving ahead of me the whole way, never seen clearly.
Big beech left of the bench: bark smooth and grey with a green tinge on the north side, one long scar at knee height, edges curled out.
Sketch of the scar.
Next time: check whether the holly by the gate has berries yet. Look up jay call.

Nothing in that entry is remarkable. That is exactly why it will be worth reading in a year.

Sketching Without Being an Artist

Most people stop sketching at around eleven years old, decide they cannot draw, and never try again. Ignore that. In a forest journal, a drawing is a measuring instrument, not a picture.

Use a soft pencil and keep it small — five centimetres across is plenty. Draw one thing, not a scene. Start with the outline of the whole shape, then add the largest divisions, then two or three details that actually matter to you: the way the leaf margin curls, where the branch joins the trunk. Resist shading; it eats time and hides uncertainty.

Write notes straight onto the drawing. "Lighter underneath." "Veins go to the tip, not the edge." "Smelled of almonds when crushed." A rough sketch with three accurate notes is better field work than a tidy one with none. If you truly do not want to draw, do rubbings instead: bark, a leaf underside, a seed head, with a soft pencil over thin paper.

Habits That Keep a Journal Going

Most journals die in the third week, when the blank page starts to feel like homework. Protect against that with a few small rules:

• Write during the walk, not after. Five minutes sitting on a log beats an hour of good intentions at the kitchen table.
• Set a floor, not a target. Three lines counts as a full entry. Really.
• Keep the kit small. A notebook that fits a coat pocket and a pencil stub will travel with you; a hardback sketchbook and a tin of pencils will stay in the hallway.
• Let it be ugly. Cross things out, write on the back of the page, draw over your own notes. Neatness is a later problem.
• Go back to the same place. One wood, walked often, will teach you far more than five new ones.
• Fill in the date first. Even if the rest of the entry is two words.

Reading Back

Once a season, sit down with the notebook and read a month of it. You will find things you did not know you had recorded: that the wood was silent for three weeks in July, that the same fungus appeared on the same stump two years running, that you always hear the woodpecker on the western path in the morning. That is when the notebook stops being a chore and becomes a record of a place, and you are the only person who has it.

Your First Week

Choose one walk you can repeat easily, twenty minutes from home or from the car park, and go three times in seven days. Write the date and weather every time. Describe one thing properly each visit — the same thing, if you can bear it, since a single tree watched for a week teaches more than a whole wood glanced at once. Sketch once, badly, and don't fix it.

At the end of the week, read your three entries in one sitting. Whatever you found yourself writing about without being told to is the thing your journal is actually about. Start there next time.

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