Of Field Notes

We’ve been talking about how to keep better field notes for birding. Neither of us is very systematic: at best we’ll record a list of species for each birding trip, but since our usual birding field trips cover a whole lot of road miles, that produces a list more for fun than of any objective value. Geographer that I am, I like to have good locality information at the very least, but GPS units make it very easy to provide this. Pica is quite interested in using a field notebook to get better at sketching birds.

Back in college, I was taught a system for field notes developed by Joseph Grinnell, the founding director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at UC Berkeley. I think this method is too rigorous for the likes of us but it’s definitely a standard to look up to.