Notes on taking field notes

For those with an academic orientation perhaps field notes are easy. There is a specific aim. But for the amateur nature enthusiast, or amateur naturalist, taking notes can also be a great activity and can greatly enrich your experience of nature.

You may not be sure what exactly to take notes of. I would like to provide some guidelines, share my own experiences, and reasons for note taking.

Here are some really random examples from field notes that I have taken:

• Sharpe's Grysbok on p.m. drive.


• Damara Dik dik. ♀ squatting and urinating in display manner (17h10) (Gate Namutoni,) scratches the area she urinated on.


• Bushman's South ±100 Oryx. There are many Orxy & Springbok scattered around all over now. Note: Afternoon wind still strong.


• Pan [Etosha] still with water from Springbokvlakte on. Lot's of birds, but far. Incl. Pelicans and Herons

Those notes were taken all over the place and just give examples of how I was just jotting things down. I did make some careful descriptions from time to time, tried to keep up with weather, and even GPS co-ords from time to time. But mostly it was those simple scribbled notes that I found gained a value over time.

• List Okay, I put listing first because it's worth a whole post by itself. To most people, no big deal. To birders it can be.
  
  To half the birders it's all about the lists and to others the lists are seen as evil things. I, of course, love lists. This post is a list isn't it? A list is easy to do. You go out, write what you see and you have a list. Compare it to previous lists and you start very easily to learn something about the area. Compare it with others, and you have a good reason to start a club and have a drink together!
  



• Behavior If you are visiting the same places regularly and often seeing the same animals over and over it can become boring. But if you keep very general notes about behavior you will be amazed a year or two in, how significant those notes are. One great personal example would be Springbok on NamibRand Nature Reserve.
  
  Over the years I made notes of what they were eating along with the date. It seemed boring. I probably did it just because I wanted to appear to be a serious student of nature and animal behavior. Well, it may have meant nothing at the time. But a couple years later I was able to compare dry years notes to wet years notes and to compare what they ate compared to what food I saw. It also taught me to 'see' the food. It made such a difference in my guiding. One year I was still talking about "Springbok gestation period...horn length...da da da.." and the next I was saying "Look, now they are starting to eat... because ...dropping...pregnant..." And that's just springbok. Same went for many things. Not just big things. Just notes I took on tracks in the dunes taught me a lot.
  
  One very important thing is that I was hardly consistent. Sometimes I took great notes. At other times I had guide issues or whatever on my mind. After a year or two it really didn't matter.
  
  The point is, even simple notes, as long as you READ them later, teach you a LOT.
  




• Special Notes give you that special knowledge. It's partly covered in the notes above. But if you look at it the other way around, the guy who didn't take notes looses so much knowledge of what goes on. I would basically say that it is the key to calling yourself a naturalist. If you take notes, you know something those who don't can't now. Like I said above, you do have to read those notes for this to be true. Taken notes, carefully filed away and never touched again just make you look organized. Notes used and read and compared and integrated into what you study, observe and hear from others, that's the stuff!
  




• Report It helps you report. Notes give you the information you need to give to report sightings to relevant authorities or conservation bodies. Sometimes you may not even know, while in the field, what you need to give these people. Careful, thoughtful notes will make it easier and you get better the more you report. I have, at times, done this fantastically, but at other times I have been really poor. I know that some of the people who may take the occasional peek at this blog know all to well how that went! Yes, I know.....
  
  But still, even if I wasn't always the best, I did try and sometimes that effort was actually useful to people. It's those facts and numbers that, used by the right people, are going to help conservationists around the world make those decisions that we need to keep the world from being destroyed at the hands of man. So, some numbers or careful observations of yours may disappear into the void of science and conservation and government archives, but don't despair. There are those who dig carefully to produce useful data out of the stuff. To summarize, just hand in your notes...come on...don't make those poor conservations beg...they have better work to do (I put this in just so that they would forgive me!)
  




• Share I don't know about you, but I love to read good stuff about nature. I love it. I subscribe to wildwatch (a nature/sightings blog by &beyond) and subscribe to many blogs. I read magazines. I hardly ever read books these days, because there is just to much other stuff to get read. With your notes, you and I have a chance to create this kind of material. Blogs, of course, give a great opportunity to share not only with conservationists, but to everyone.
  
  If you ever do have a good story that you would just love to share from your experiences in the wild, let me know and I may post it on this blog or, if it's African in nature, may even post it on African Bush Stories (my wilds of Africa stories blog.)
  
  




• Discover Perhaps this is obvious. If you take careful notes when you find stuff, you are going to know much better when what you see is interesting from a taxonomy point of view. Your notes are the proof that what you saw has not been seen before. Or your insight may lead to a significant study.
  




• Remember Just for you. If I take a look my field notes, it can really take me back. I remember special events and I remember my life at that time. Sightings are a memory tag.
  
  I noticed one thing over the years. Hyenas decreased and Leopards increased over time on NamibRand Nature Reserve. Why, well, I could talk at length about that, and probable have mentioned it in this blog before. But that's not important. What is important is that my notes clearly show this trend over the year. Clear to me, perhaps not as scientific data, but enough to give me an understanding of what was going on.
• Another side to using notes in this way relates to photography. When you take photographs these days with digital cameras it is getting easier and easier to just shoot more images. When you get home it may be hard to remember which ones are important. If there are notes in your field notes referring to a photograph you took, it is easier to remember why you took it.
  

Next time you have the chance to be out in nature and do some birding or simply enjoy the experience, scribble a couple of notes and you may find it becomes a habit that makes your experience in nature much richer!

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Recent freelance namibia tour

I have just come back from my latest tour. It was my first accommodated tour as a freelance guide. I was very happy to do an accommodated tour as I don't really plan to do camping trips with Frantic Naturalist.

The tour was very different from normal trips as we first went to a farm. The guests I had were a really amazing family. The family had once owned a farm in Namibia, and so the whole reason for the trip was to visit the farm for it's hundred year celebration.

On the farm we ate a lot of meat...a Namibian pastime. I'm not such a big meat eater, but it was actually interesting for me to get to see real Namibian farm life.

We returned to Windhoek from the farm. Then we headed north to Aloe Grove Safari Lodge in the Ojiwarongo region. Nice setting. I didn't enjoy the area, as they had cats (lion, leopard and cheetah) orphans in holding pens. They do a game drive to, but it feels very farm like.

Then we headed up north to Ndhovu Safari Lodge in the Caprivi. This lodge is very close to Mahangu Game Reserve where they do game drives. I love the area. The Caprivi is so different from the rest of Namibia, with large rivers (Ndhovu is on the Kavango river which becomes the Okavango later,) and more birds.

I found the lodge nice for a cheaper place. Great view over the river and some good birds in the area (I will post birds separately.) I did find that the owner, manager didn't really know his stuff to well with birds or with wildlife in general.

Then we headed to Botswana where I left the guests in Kasani before returning home. I had hoped to try for Souzas Shrike on my return, but I couldn't find it. I will have another go some time!

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Some birding tips

Are you a birding beginner. Or intermediate? I want to just share some tips at random, that I have been thinking about in my own development as a birder.

I would describe my birding history like this: When I first started to talk I have a word for birds within my first ten words (ref: Parents); at 8 moved to remote area in Kenya, at about 8 and a bit met a guy called Erik and learned about nature fanatics - we were first and foremost scorpion enthusiasts, and most of all pleased with their ability to scare our moms, but we were birding and I had a bird book of common birds in Kenya. I lost that book somewhere, but would love to see it again. I kept my first attempt at a life list in there.

All through high school I developed friendships with nature enthusiasts and birds and birding featured high...although I didn't keep a bird list at the time. Nor did I have a book or binos. Just learned some stuff from friends.

Then my studying years and the birders I met were 'listers.' I started keeping my own life list which I started in 1995. From that time I have been a little fanatical. I don't have a great life list yet (about 614 at the moment,) but love to bird my local spots. I really enjoyed getting to know the birds of the southern pro-Namib over the last seven years or so, and now I am really loving having the chance to get to know the coastal birds in a very thorough way.

Advice
I would like to not repeat to much of the stuff that you read in every "how to" post. I hope some of this stuff is useful. If not, well it has been to me.

Learn birding from mentors. Many birders have a habit of going out with clubs or with a birding buddy or often alone. I certainly have done most of my birding alone or with people who know less than I did (not because I know so much, rather it's just because I am a guide, and so most of the people I have birded with are not serious birders.) If you bird alone, there are many things that you can figure out, but eventually you reach a point where there are birds you get stuck on. Also there are many birds that if only a single little thing, how the beak probes the mud, who hard the woodpecker pecks, and so on...if they were pointed out to you, it makes the id's so much easier. I know this both ways. I have also found with guides that I am training, that there are so many birds I think are easy id's that they struggle with until I point out very simple things. I just had a case over the weekend of helping me with Terns. I have been so obsessed with bills for identifying terns that I have often missed the really easy ways to tell the common, and not so common Terns apart. Thanks to a little birding with a mentor, I have had one of those 'aha' moments with my tern identification.

Stalking and field skills. Many beginners don't really think about field skills, but if you scare the bird away, or don't get close enough, you can't identify it. Each habitat has it's own rules. Here again mentors can help a lot. Practice also matters. You will see sometimes with coastal birding that getting out of your car with chase everything away. Birds have great vision, so don't think you can sneak too much. Standing still is an important skill. In Savanna areas you will find that half an hour of doing nothing with slowly bring out a lot of life around you. Just some ideas...books can be written about the skills involved.

Study your field guides. I just today saw a warbler which I couldn't identify. It was one of two warblers, one with an eyebrow strip the other without, one with slightly longer wings than the other. I had a good look, but didn't take in the right field characteristics before if went back into the reeds. I could guess which it was, but I didn't have one of those 'got you' ids, and so I left it off. Had I properly sussed out the field characteristics before I was there, the very short look I had of the bird would have been enough - I would have looked at the right characteristics before it flew off. Not knowing what to look for, it took me to long to get the right characteristics because I was looking at everything, and the bird only gave me a couple seconds of good viewing. Know what you are looking for.

For rare birds, study even more. So I am looking to find some rare birds this year. I am at the coast a lot, have more time on my hands than before, and so rare bird finding, one of the most rewarding (if only for the pats on the back) parts of birding, is what I am gunning for. Summer is on it's way in, and so are the birds. Now I am no coastal hot shot. The guys who have been here for years have seen many of the birds we hope may show up. But I have only seen a few rare coastal birds in my life. So I am studying more than the others. One way I have found to do this is to look at photo blogs and websites from North America and Europe to study those birds that we very rarely have a chance to photograph. A good example...just a couple days ago we were looking at the little stints at the Mile 4 salt works in Swakopmund and trying to see if there were no Red-necked Stints among them. I have never seen a Red-necked Stint, but I have been looking at photos and picture, such as the Red-necked Stint pictures on birdingtotheedg.blogspot.com

Equipment should work with you. Now I keep my binos without a strap because so much birding I do is from a car, and I don't like to have to pass my binoculars to my guests with a strap getting stuck all the time. So I just get rid of it. But now I did a boat trip in the Caprivi strip recently. The Caprivi has big rivers. The rivers have Crocodiles and hippos and they are deep and murky. Needless to say, I nearly lost my bins overboard, and so next time I got there, I will be sure to fix another strap. Actually, if you are in my situation, where others often use your bins, it is simply better to have two pairs. I don't like to lend out my expensive binos, because I would not possibly be able to replace them at this time in my life.

So, those were just some random thoughts buzzing though my head. Hope someone finds them helpful. Enjoy nature!

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