By Cathy Diaz in Creative — Mar 10, 2025

What The F*** Is Bird Journaling?

Bird Journaling combines the act of journaling with bird watching. It catalogues your nature experiences while providing a creative outlet. It's a wonderful way to combine and flex both your creative and analytical sides of your brain.

Photo by Boston Public Library / Unsplash

Spring is in the air, and of course, what are we going to talk about?

Bird Journaling!

Choice of Journal

Depending on how you will bird journal can help determine your choice of journal style. If you think you're going to possibly do some sketching or drawing, blank pages or sketchbooks can be useful here. If you plan on no drawing, lined journals for note taking may be your preference. A combination of note taking and drawing, a dotted page to help guide for writing but also give you space to draw may be helpful. If you don't care about guiding lines or dots for writing, then a blank page may suit you best. Keep in mind for extensive visual catalogues, sketchbooks have the heavier paper that artists prefer.

white and gray bird plush toy on white printer paper — Photo by pure julia / Unsplash

What to Include In Your Very First Bird Journal

You! Start with your name, your contact info, if you lose this bird journal in the wild, give a good samaritan a chance to give it back.

Date, Time, Place: Give some basic info on your bird experiences. Maybe you went to a national park one summer and saw a cool hawk or went to the zoo with your nephews and pointed at Flamingoes. It's your journal, you do you boo.

The Bird: What bird was it that caught your eye? Was it a big guy or a runt? Was it a cute hummingbird or the woodpecker from hell?

Draw It/Photograph It: Not everyone can actually draw a bird (raises hand) so I've added photography. Reserve a space for the photograph, or photograph it anyway and use it to draw the bird. (Those buggers have wings, you know).

Cool Stuff: Is there a nest? Were the birds singing to each other? Mating calls? Are they flying together or keeping eggs warms? What's going on birder friend?

black chalk board with chalk board — Photo by Jose Hernandez-Uribe / Unsplash

Why even do this?

There's a host of benefits of journaling, that also extends to bird journaling. We've talked about some benefits in the past, but here's some specific to bird journalers:

Practice observational skills: by looking for birds and reflecting upon natural habitats, your actively using and honing your observational skills.
Increase your connection to nature, which as a by-product can also decrease your stress.
Exercise a creative outlet through drawing, notations, and bird watching. Contribution to citizen science. There's organizations like Scistarter that offer regular people opportunities to further science.