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Make Your Own Field Guide

ByKate Righter

Looking for a way to turn your nature journaling into something you can share with the community? Consider making a field guide for a nearby nature area!

  1. Choose your focus. Try to narrow it down until the project feels achievable. The more specific you are, the easier it is to begin!
    • Are you focusing on native plants or including introduced species? Are you looking at plants, birds, animals, fungi, insects? Or maybe you want to think about soil, or geological features, or explore waterways… you get to choose!
    • What season are you interested in (different plants bloom at different times, some birds are only present during certain parts of the year, etc.)?
    • Where are your geographic limits? Your boundaries can be political (like a town or city), elevation (coastal, inland, mountain), climate zones (dryland, rainforest, etc), or something else! Consider even making it hyperlocal, like birds in your neighborhood.
    • You can choose to focus on parts of nature that you’re familiar with or that you’d like to learn more about, parts that are common or those that are often overlooked.
    • You can think about cultural uses or historical relationships with the place or species to help you define your project.
    • You can also discover your focus by going back over nature journal pages you’ve previously made to see what themes you have been exploring already. What are you already interested in? What have you already observed and discovered? What do you want to learn more about?
  2. Begin exploring your focus by creating different nature journal pages or field guide pages. You don’t need to worry about formatting at this point, this is just to test out your idea. What do you find most interesting about what you’re noticing?
    • Note: Your guide doesn’t have to be “complete” to be useful! It can be a guide to just a few species… or even just a lot of information about one thing, especially if you follow it through the seasons or through a full growth cycle (from seed to flower to seed).
  3. Do some research, and experiment with different ways to add what you’ve learned to your nature journal pages.
    • Consider using lots of different ways of gathering information. Not only traditional field guides, but also personal experience, knowledge shared by cultural practitioners, and others who have their own experiences (such as fishermen, hikers, volunteers, etc.)
    • Try to summarize what you’ve learned — the goal of a guide isn’t to share everything you about every species you cover, but to get people interested and wanting to learn more.
  4. Start to decide on a format for the pages of your guide. Vertical or horizontal? What do you want on every page? Where is your artwork, your writing, and your data? Try out a few different ways of organizing your page.
  5. Choose what sort of information and data you want to share across all the pages.
  6. Consider how you want to share your work. If you are hoping to make it into a published book (see below), you’ll have to be able to scan your pages, so you will need to make them on loose sheets or in a sketchbook that will lay flat on a scanner (or lay flat for you to photograph).
  7. Begin the work of making your pages. You can either focus on working on one page at a time, from sketch to a finished product with color, or sketch out lots of pages, then add detail over time.
  8. If you’d like to be able to share it with others, begin photographing or scanning your pages.
    • Print option: There are a number of online services, like lulu.com, that allow you to upload a pdf file to make a printed book. Here’s a blog post I found that describes the process in more detail.
    • Online option: Upload your pages to either a free service like Canva, Google docs or slides, or create a website. You can also create a pdf with all of your images using a program like Microsoft Word.
  9. Share it with friends, neighbors, and on social media (including Wonderland)
  10. Consider celebrating your accomplishment with a picnic!

Need inspiration? Check out Kate Rutter’s new book, Bay Area Botanical.

In the Classroom

Lesson plan from Wild Wonder Foundation: https://www.wildwonder.org/activity-collection-or-field-guide

Example field guide instructions for students: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gnnc69I2UUEuMb9XZGgXsQLD7PN3G9OD9RoRt-lMlm4/edit?usp=sharing (note: to make edits for use in your own classroom, go to “File” and then “Make a Copy”. Save the copy on your drive, and then you can edit your new copy to match your needs.)

Lesson plan for an in-depth plant research project with a grading rubric: https://oneschoolonefarm.com/for-teachers/ (scroll down near the bottom for “Plant Research and Ecological Design“)

Video from the NJEF with teacher Rachael Robbins discussing how she used field guides in her classroom:

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