More thoughts on field notebooks

CC image of Martin Moynihan's field notes.

It occurred to me that the field notebook may seem a tad intimidating. All those empty pages waiting to be filled. But with what? Field notebooks, field journals, have always been a staple part of the way scientists work. They're a personal activity and luckily there are few rules about how they should be laid out and what they should contain. They're part of the creative process of how scientists observe, think, interpret and analyse.  This makes them a unique way of accurately recording details and data and circumstances, and can bring to life what you're working on in a way that mere recording sheets or databases never can. If you throw yourself into them, you can produce something of lasting interest and value.

Charles Darwin's notes on the Beagle don't seem to have been neat, but they were obviously legible enough to be useful to him later in developing his ideas. (You might have to work a bit harder on your handwriting so the person marking can appreciate your insights). I thoroughly recommend reading them - they bring his journey to life and are very readable. Here's an extract:

In the low dry region there are but few Tortoises: they are replaced by infinite numbers of the large yellow herbivorous Lizard, mentioned at Albemarle Isd. The burrows of this animal are so very numerous that we had difficulty in finding a spot to pitch the tents. These lizards live entirely on vegetable productions; berries, leaves, for which latter they frequently crawl up the trees, especially a Mimosa; never drinking water, they like much the succulent Cactus, & for a piece of it they will, like dogs, struggle [and] seize it from another. Their congeners* the “imps of darkness” in like manner live entirely on sea weed. I suspect such habits are nearly unique in the Saurian race. 
[* i.e. similar lizard relations.]

One of Darwin's iguana friends (CC image Jimrules42)

You may feel your expeditions around Bristol to find specimens are a little less exciting - but remember, lizards must seem everyday to Galapagos Islanders. Darwin crams in a lot of observations - the large number of lizards, their crowded living arrangements, where he'd seen them before, their vegetarian diet, their fightiness... he also compares the species to a seaweed-eating relation. What similar observations could you make about tracking down your chosen group? Why have you chosen the locations you've visited? You can step back and think about the wider habitat in which your species live (are they seemingly associated with certain conditions or other species?), or if you're collecting animals, can you comment their behaviour? Can you compare your latest find to any similar species you've previously identified?

Darwin collected a lot of specimens on his journey - these were all labelled carefully and matched to entries in the catalogues of his field journals. You need to do this too, showing your organised system (as if I would ever come home with a jumble of poorly labelled pots in my pockets). After all, if you don't know where your specimens came from, they're not much use. And you might be able to copy some characteristics of your species from a textbook later - but it would be much more satisfying to note in the field that your Amanita mushroom was next to a birch tree, and later find out this was a typical habitat. So it's good to make lots of observations actually in the field, and note down any questions that come to mind - you might not remember later.

Back at home (or in a lizard-infested tent), the notes can be mulled over, and interpretations, hypotheses, speculations added in. Thus the 'what' is mostly recorded in the field, but the 'why' and 'how' might come later.

These look like footprints?

You might want to take photos too - but capturing such an image is not necessarily observing, looking, noticing. Which brings me to one of my pet subjects, drawing. Drawing is an active process. You're engaging with what's in front of you and picking out what's most important. With a snappy photo (experienced photographers with appropriate equipment aside), the most relevant details of the scene tend to get lost. A drawing can be annotated on the spot to highlight important features.

It's more time consuming than snapping a picture, I know. But how greatly your notebook will be enhanced by a few sketches. Or failing that, an annotated photograph or printed diagram.

My quick annotated sketch enabled me to later identify this Tenerifean plant as Forsskaolea angustifolia.

When you go to Tenerife (and later if you're off to Cuba or Madagascar), you have to keep a field notebook with more quantitative data - organised tables, calculations, methods, results and conclusions. This exercise won't require much of that type of data. But you can still try to incorporate a certain amount of Order to your notebook - a contents page, page numbers, dates, locations, the habitat, the weather. You should note the sources of any information and underline your Latin names. You can make a separate species list at the back (or front) of your book.

James Arthur Peter's Mexican snake (CC image)

If you can make your notebook engaging and visually attractive as well as being a good scientific record of what you've seen, done and thought about, then you should get a good mark for this section! Effort here may also influence the marks you get elsewhere, because the marker will be able to see how diligently you have gone about identifying your specimens.

There's plenty of inspiration online if you want to see field notebooks belonging to ecologists, anthropologists, archaeologists, geologists and so on. I'd love to get hold of this book: Field Notes on Science and Nature by Michael R Canfield but you can see some inspiring drawings on the link (and this one) in the meantime.

There's much going on online to transcribe such notebooks and make them accessible and searchable - here is a notebook at the Smithsonian which documents gull behaviour in Peru and Chile. There are many such examples at the Field Book Project website. Or for more inspiration just Google 'Field Journal'.