For many people the New Year is a time for making resolutions. For me, it’s a great time for reflecting on what I’ve accomplished in the past year and setting intentions and goals for the new year to come in terms of nature study. Below is a run down of how I did on my 2020 goals, as well as what I hope to accomplish in 2021.

My goals for 2020 included:

1. Post to Seashore to Forest Floor regularly. — I managed to post new blog content approximately 3 times a month, for a total of 36 blog posts in 2020. This wasn’t quite as frequent as I had hoped, but I’m glad I was able to maintain regular content updates nonetheless.

2. Maintain the “perpetual nature journal” I started in 2018. — This goal was inspired by Lara Gastinger’s perpetual nature journal. As, with the last two years, I missed a number of the weeks, but the benefit of this journal format is that if I miss a week, it’s completely fine, as I will be able to add to that page in future years when I come back around to it. All told, I completed an entry in 40 out of 52 weeks – 3 more than last year. Examples of two different double-page spreads, each representing a week, are shown below.

3. Continue to coordinate the Upper Cape Naturalists Club. — Despite the restrictions COVID-19 placed on in-person gatherings, the Upper Cape Naturalists Club had a relatively successful year. After March, we were still able to host a handful of virtual talks, and the club was able to adapt our outdoor walks (e.g., masks required, limited numbers, etc.) to continue exploring the natural world together safely.

4. Complete Level I of the Wilderness Awareness School’s Kamana Independent Study Program. — I had been eyeing this program for years, but always seemed to have another major commitment or undertaking that I was involved in, causing me to wonder if I had the appropriate time and resources to devote to the program. I know it’s hard to think of the COVID-19 pandemic as having a silver lining, but it definitely freed up my schedule, allowing me to spend the time time completing not only Level I, but Level II as well. 

5. Do more nature journaling. — This was, admittedly, a rather vague goal. As such, it’s hard to quantify a level of success, but I was able to get out on a number of nature journaling specific outings. You can see the results of a couple of these outings below.  

For 2021, I plan to continue posting to the blog, drawing in my perpetual nature journal regularly, and coordinating the Upper Cape Naturalists Club. But I also have three additional nature study goals I hope to achieve:

1. Complete Level III of the Kamana Naturalist Training program. — I plan to order the course materials in the next couple of weeks. Given the scope of the program, it will probably take me most of the year to complete. 

2. Continue my weekly yard bird count. — I started keeping track of the different birds I saw last January without really knowing that it would turn into a year-long dataset. I thought I might see 30 or 40 species by the end of the year. By the end of the year, however, I had identified 69 different species (a higher count than some “birding hotspots” on eBird!). Some, like the black-capped chickadee and the northern cardinal, are clearly year-round yard residents that I see every day. Others, such as the turkey vulture and the red-tailed hawk, are present year round but do not live in the yard. And then there were the migrants, sometimes rare and exciting birds that may have only stopped in the yard for a moment: a yellow-bellied sapsucker, scarlet tanager and Wilson’s warbler. I plan to continue this list for 2021. It’ll be interesting to compare the two at the end of the year (e.g., do the dark-eyed juncos leave at the same time each year? do the summer residents return at the same time? etc.). 

3. Develop new Seashore to Forest Floor programs. — I had hoped to do this in 2020, but I held off due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I’m hoping by this coming summer, life will start returning a bit more to normal and in-person gatherings will be more possible. My goal is to offer nature journaling classes, property-based plant tours, and an in-depth seasonal nature connection class. Stay tuned as details are developed.

Do you have any nature study goals? If so, I’d love to hear about them. Share them in the comments below.