a naturalist is someone who looks closely at living things and writes down what they see. that is the whole job. you do not need a degree, a microscope or a forest. you need a notebook, a pencil and ten minutes, and a window will do to start. this article explains what naturalists do, in plain words, and walks you through your first ten minutes, your first page of notes and your first name for something you found.
someone who pays attention to nature on purpose, and keeps a record of it.
the word comes from natural history, the oldest way of studying nature: going outside, looking, and describing what is there. long before there were laboratories, nearly everything people knew about plants and animals came from this kind of looking. it still matters today, because a good question in biology usually starts with something somebody noticed.
a naturalist is not quite the same as a scientist, though many scientists started as naturalists. a scientist tests an idea. a naturalist mostly notices, and writes it down. the two need each other: the notes come first, and the questions grow out of them.
some of the most famous naturalists began with nothing you do not already have. as a student, charles darwin collected beetles. one day he caught a rare beetle in each hand, then saw a third he wanted too, so he popped one of them into his mouth to free a hand. it squirted something burning on his tongue, he had to spit it out, and he lost two of the three (darwin 1887). his habit of looking closely, and of not giving up, later took him around the world.
maria sibylla merian, born in 1647, raised caterpillars at home and painted every stage of their lives: the egg, the caterpillar, the pupa and the butterfly or moth, with the plant each one ate. in her day, many people still thought insects could come out of mud or rotting food. at 52 she sailed to suriname, in south america, with her daughter dorothea, to watch the insects there the same way, and in 1705 she published a book of what she found (merian 1705).
what made both of them naturalists was not genius. it was a habit: look, write it down, then look again.
look closely, write it down, find a name, and go back. then do it again.
look. slow down, and use more than your eyes: listen, smell, feel the bark. most animals hide from someone who moves fast and talks loudly, and come back out for someone who sits still. look at one thing for longer than feels normal. a whole minute on one leaf is a long time, and you will see things in it you have walked past for years.
write it down. memory is bad at details. by tomorrow you will not remember whether the bird had a pale stripe over its eye or under it. a note made on the spot keeps it, along with the date and the place, which you will forget even faster. naturalists call these field notes.
find a name. a name lets you look a thing up and talk about it with other people. but you do not need one to start. “small brown bird with a stripe over its eye” is a perfectly good note, and it is much better than a wrong name written with confidence.
go back. the same place at another time of day, or in another month, is a new place. flowers open and close, birds arrive and leave, leaves change colour. most of what a naturalist learns comes from returning.
less than you think, and most of it you already have.
do not buy anything yet. the first month is for finding out what you enjoy looking at. some people fall for birds, some for insects, some for mosses, mushrooms or clouds. the right equipment depends on which, and a notebook and a pencil work for all of them.
one spot, one page, ten minutes. that is a complete first outing.
here is what a first page might hold. yours can be messier.
look at what makes this page useful. it says exactly when and where. it has numbers: six pigeons, four kinds of bird calls. it describes what the brown bird was doing, not just what it looked like. and it asks a question. a page like this, written every week for a year, would show the birds nesting, the ants busy and then quiet, and the tree losing and growing its leaves.
a name is a key: with it, you can find everything anyone has ever written about the thing.
most living things have a common name, the one people use in everyday speech, like robin or dandelion. common names are friendly, but they change from place to place, and sometimes one name means two different animals.
the robin is the classic example. in britain, a robin is a small, round bird with an orange face and breast. in north america, a robin is a much bigger bird with an orange belly. settlers from britain gave the american bird the name of the one they knew at home, because of its colour. the two birds are not even in the same family.
so scientists give every species, every kind of living thing, a scientific name that is the same in every language. it has two parts. the first is the genus, a group of close relatives, a bit like a family name. the second picks out one species inside that group. the british robin is Erithacus rubecula. the american robin is Turdus migratorius. scientific names are written in italics, with a capital letter on the first part only. this two-part system was made the standard by carl linnaeus, a swedish botanist, in 1753 for plants and in 1758 for animals (linnaeus 1753, 1758).
names also fit inside each other, like an address: country, city, street, house. both robins are perching birds, the largest group of birds there is. after that they go separate ways:
you do not need to learn any of this by heart. it is enough to know that the name is a key, and that there are three ways to find it, from slowest to fastest:
the brown bird carrying mud on the imagined page above would turn out to be a rufous hornero, Furnarius rufus, common in parks across south america. it builds a round nest of mud that looks like an old bread oven, which is where its name comes from: hornero is spanish for a baker, someone who works an oven. a name like that is one more thing to notice next time: is the nest finished, and who is inside?
a phone can suggest a name in seconds. treat it as a suggestion, not an answer.
several free apps look at a photo, or listen to a sound, and suggest what it might be. they learned to do it from millions of pictures and recordings that people had already named. these four are the best known:
| app | what it is for |
|---|---|
| inaturalist | any plant, animal or fungus you can photograph. it suggests a name, then real people check it, and what they agree on can go to scientists. |
| seek | a first try, or a walk with children. made by inaturalist, it suggests names on the phone itself and gives badges for what you find. no account needed. |
| merlin bird id | a bird you can hear but not see. it listens and lists the birds it hears. it can also name a bird from a photo, or from a few questions about it. |
| ebird | keeping a list of every bird on a walk. scientists use these lists to map where birds live and when they move. |
inaturalist is worth a closer look, because it is the one that turns a photo into something scientists can use. here is what happens to a photo you post:
that is the clever part: the app is fast, and people are careful. the app’s guess gets you started, and other people’s eyes make it trustworthy.
a page of notes about one place, kept for years, is a record nobody else has.
one of the easiest sciences to join is phenology: the study of when things happen in nature. the first flower of spring, the day the swallows come back, the first frost. all it asks of you is the date, and the patience to keep writing it down.
in kyoto, japan, people have written down the day the cherry trees were in full bloom for more than 1,200 years. the oldest dates come from old diaries and chronicles, starting in the year 812. scientists led by yasuyuki aono gathered them into one record (aono and kazui 2008, aono and saito 2010), and it is kept up to this year:
| years | day of april |
|---|---|
| 812–1399 | 14 |
| 1400–1899 | 15 |
| 1900–1949 | 13 |
| 1950–1999 | 9 |
| 2000–2026 | 4 |
in 2021 the trees were in full bloom on 26 march, and in 2023 on 25 march: the two earliest dates in the whole record. this year it was 29 march. the dates follow the warmth of march so closely that scientists use the old ones to work out how warm the springs of kyoto were long before anyone had a thermometer.
the same thing happened on the other side of the world. henry david thoreau, the american writer, noted when the plants around concord, in massachusetts, first flowered, from 1852 to 1858. a century and a half later, two biologists, abraham miller-rushing and richard primack, went out and noted the same plants. 43 common kinds now flower seven days earlier, on average, than in thoreau’s time, and concord has warmed by 2.4 °C (miller-rushing and primack 2008).
neither thoreau nor the diarists of kyoto knew what their notes would one day be used for. that is the point. you write it down now, and someone finds out later what it means.
today you can share your notes the day you make them. this is called community science, or citizen science: ordinary people collecting observations that scientists use. two easy ways in:
the first rule of a naturalist is to leave things as they were found.
seven small things, one a day. none takes more than fifteen minutes.
| day | what to do |
|---|---|
| 1 | sit at your spot for ten minutes and write the top line: the date, the time, the place and the weather. |
| 2 | count how many kinds of birds you can hear from a window or a doorway. |
| 3 | draw one leaf as big as the page, with all its veins. |
| 4 | look at something tiny up close, with a hand lens or your phone’s camera: moss, an ant, the middle of a flower. |
| 5 | find the name of one thing, with a field guide, a person or an app. |
| 6 | go out at another time of day, early in the morning or at dusk, when many animals are busiest. |
| 7 | go back to your spot, read your first page, and write down one thing that has changed. |
you become a naturalist the first time you look at something for longer than you needed to and write down what you saw. everything else is coming back.