Keeping a Nature Journal

One of my goals for this year was to be more purposeful in making entries in my nature journal. So far it’s been a fairly good month…

I started off by finishing the phenology wheel I kept the whole of last year. I was disappointed at the beginning of the month as I paged through my journal and realised that I had only made one or two entries for the whole year but at least I kept my phenology wheel. I’m wondering if I should do it again this year. I haven’t decided yet.

Our first nature walk was focused on squirrels. We are taking our nature walk study opportunities to explore the different parks and woodlands near us. This particular park had loads of squirrels, all grey as the red squirrel in this country has largely been driven far north by this little bully.

Bully or not, we enjoyed watching their antics and find them rather sweet. In the winter months, they are far more brazen as they run up to you hoping that you have a tasty morsel or two for them. In summer they mostly keep to the branches above.

While I contemplate on keeping another phenology wheel of the seasons this year, I thought that to create one to track the growing daylight hours in the month of January would be a good exercise. It is very interesting to see how our daylight grows every day. It starts off slow and slight and by this time we are gaining almost two minutes of daylight each day. By the time we reach the end of January we should be seeing the sunrise before 8am!

My latest entry is of Decembers Full moon and the blood moon that I observed on the 22nd and 24th of December. 

The reason why I used the photographs I took of the moon over those two days as opposed to the Super Blood Moon that appeared over the UK in the early hours of  Monday morning, is because we had too much cloud cover to observe the super blood moon this month. But I had captured some fab pictures in December of the partial lunar eclipse and of course that beautiful full Cold moon.

Full ‘Cold’ Moon 22 December 2018

I’m thinking that I may keep a photo record of all the Full moons (at least those that I can see) for this year. If you want to take moon photographs all you need is a good bridge camera. If you have a DSLR all the better but I took these photographs with my little bridge camera.

Partial Lunar Eclipse 24 December 2018 gives us a Blood Moon

Did you know that the moons all have names? The Native American names differ from the names as set out in the old English Almanacs. According to the Old Farmers Almanac, the Native Americans’ full moon names were created to help the different tribes track the seasons.

I find folklore and the old ways so fascinating. It was all very in tune with the seasons, weather and farming life which I love. 

Well, that wraps up today’s post. It’s the Big Garden Bird Watch this weekend so I’ll be back before then with a post. Until then, have a lovely day.