About Seasonkeeper

Seasonkeeper is a dated field journal. Every entry records one outing: where it was, what the weather was doing, which species were out, and which phase of the season they were in — leaf-out, flowering, fruiting, senescence, migration. Alongside each note sits the drawing the day asked for.

Why keep a journal instead of a species list

A species list tells you what lives somewhere. A dated journal tells you when, and that is the part that changes. The same oak buds on a different week from one year to the next; the first Swainson's thrush call arrives earlier in some springs than others. Those differences are only visible if somebody wrote down the date, the place and the weather on the day, and kept doing it. The notes here are not a complete survey of anything — they are one observer's repeated visits to a small number of places, written down in a form that can be compared later.

How a note is made

Each note starts as handwriting in a weatherproof notebook, out at the site. It carries the four things that cannot be reconstructed afterwards: the date, the coordinates, the temperature and sky, and the phenophase of the thing being watched. Species go down with a count and a line about behaviour — a hummingbird defending a feeder is a different observation from one moving through. Back inside, the note is written up, the figure is drawn from the same numbers, and the entry gets filed under its month.

The figures

Every figure on this site is generated rather than photographed. It is a year ring: twelve arcs, one per month, with the note placed on its own month at a radius that encodes its phenophase — furthest out for leaf-out, closest to the middle for migration. Two inks are used, graphite and a pale wash of teal, and the pencil group is run through a turbulence filter so the lines shiver the way a hand-drawn line does. The point is not decoration: a column of these figures read together shows a season moving.

What the journal does not claim

Nothing here is a scientific dataset, and no note should be cited as a record of first flowering for a region. One observer, one route, one hour of the day, an uncalibrated thermometer. What the notes can honestly support is comparison with your own observations in the same places — which is the reason to publish them at all.

Editorial rules

• No sponsored notes, no paid placements, no affiliate links. If a link is in a note it points at a reference we actually used.
• Advertising, where it appears, is kept separate from the writing and has no influence on it. Nobody pays to have a species mentioned.
• Observations are never presented as more than they are: a count of what was visible from the path, on that day, by one person.
• Corrections are welcome and are made in the open. A wrong identification is not an embarrassment, it is the normal condition of looking closely.

Corrections and contact

If a species is misidentified or a coordinate is wrong, write to [email protected] with the note's address and what you think it should say. Identifications that change get rewritten in the note, and the date at the top of the page changes with it.

Write to us: [email protected]