Welcome to the Field Notes Journal
Field Notes Journal is a record of an ongoing habit: noticing what’s around me, and writing it down.
It brings together wildlife observations, travel journals, and day-to-day field notes, alongside longer-term studies of the patterns behind them.
Everything here begins with observation, and builds over time.
On Keeping Field Notes
Most of these notes begin outdoors - on walks, in passing moments, and in the gradual accumulation of small observations. Some continue later, at a desk or bench, where they are revisited, examined, and extended.
Over time, this has grown into a set of connected strands: writing, wildlife records, travel accounts, and longer-running investigations into the patterns behind what I see.
The site brings these together as a combination of narrative, records, and analysis: written entries, structured reports, charts, images, and datasets. The tools used to create them are modern, but the approach is a familiar one - patient, incremental, and shaped by repetition.
You’ll find material here covering:
- Wildlife sightings and natural history records
- Travel journals and field-based writing
- Photography and microscopy as observational tools
- Seasonal ecology and long-term pattern analysis
- Weather observations and local environmental recording
Each part can be explored on its own, but together they form a set of personal field notes: a way of returning to everyday observations and allowing them to build into something larger over time.
If you are visiting for the first time, the Start Here page provides a guided introduction to the main sections of the site.
New booklet
Wildlife Seasonal Modelling
Exploring seasonal ecological structure through interpretable models
This booklet explores how simple seasonal models can reproduce the large-scale patterns seen in long-term wildlife observations.
Beginning with species-level seasonal curves and extending through similarity analysis, ecological neighbourhoods, and seasonal calendars, it examines how broader ecological structure can emerge from repeated observations collected over time.
New booklet
Tanzanian Safari, 2022
Field notes from a long-awaited journey
This journal follows a journey through northern Tanzania — Tarangire, Lake Eyasi, Ngorongoro, and the Serengeti — recorded day by day from notes written at the time.
Presented largely as originally written, it is a record of movement, landscape, and wildlife shaped by the immediacy of experience rather than hindsight.
New booklet
Year in the Life of Abingdon
A personal natural history of place
A year is not a sequence of months, but a pattern of appearances.
This booklet brings together seasonal patterns in birds, butterflies, and wildflowers in Abingdon, drawn from long-term observation and organised as a quiet walk through the year.