Writing field notes when the weather turns bad

The worst page in a field notebook is often the one you most want to read later. The rain came in sideways, your fingers stopped working, and you managed four words that now look like a seismograph reading. Yet that may have been the day the river covered the stepping stones and the swallows fed so low they almost touched the grass.

Bad weather is worth recording. A place behaves differently in it, and a journal kept only on fine days gives a false picture of the year. This note is about coming home with something usable: what to carry, how to write less and keep more, and when to put the notebook away altogether.

Decide first whether to stop at all

Writing means standing still, and standing still in wind and rain cools you down quickly. No observation is worth more than getting home, so settle this before anything else. On an exposed ridge, beside rising water or with thunder about, keep moving and write later.

A good working rule: stop to write only where you would be glad to stop anyway. The lee side of a wall, a bird hide, a bus shelter or the car will all do. If your hands are too cold to form letters, put on another layer or head back.

When you cannot stop, carry the note in your head. Pick three words for the thing you want to remember and repeat them as you walk. “Second ford, shin deep” will survive twenty minutes of rain and give you enough to rebuild the moment once you reach shelter.

Carry tools that forgive water

We suggested a pocket notebook and a pencil in Keeping a nature journal you will actually reread, and rain is where that advice earns its place. A few additions help:

• A softer pencil, and a spare. Graphite does not run, and a soft lead marks damp paper without tearing it. Keep a second one somewhere you can reach with gloves on.
• A zip bag. It keeps an ordinary notebook dry between entries. Notebooks with waterproof pages are worth trying if you are often out in the wet.
• A hood or a brimmed hat. Lean forward and the brim becomes a roof over the page.

Pens are less forgiving. Gel and fountain ink tend to spread on wet paper, while pressurised ballpoints are designed to keep writing on damp pages and at awkward angles.

A phone can help too, with limits. Touchscreens misread raindrops and wet fingers, so typing is often a losing fight, but a voice memo works from inside a hood with your back to the wind. Say the date and place first, because “New recording 14” will tell you nothing next week. Keep the phone in an inner pocket as well. Cold drains batteries, and on a bad day it is also your map and your way of calling for help, so it should not be spent on notes.

Write a wet-weather shorthand

Full sentences are for the evening. In the rain, aim for fragments you will still understand tonight, built from a small set of abbreviations you chose while dry. Write them inside the front cover so that a page from last November stays readable.

An invented example, using R1 to R3 for light, steady and heavy rain:

11:40 R3, gusts from SW. Stones under at 2nd ford, shin deep (ankle at 10:15). 3 swallows low over field. Can’t see far bank.

That took less than a minute and holds a paragraph’s worth of material. Notice what it contains: times, a comparison with something measured earlier, a count and a test of visibility. These survive bad handwriting and fading memory far better than “torrential” or “awful”. If you can manage only one thing, write the time, because a time lets you line up your notes with your photos and with the weather records afterwards.

Notice what only bad weather shows

Some things to watch for:

• Water. Where it runs off, which paths turn into streams, what colour the brook has become, and how fast it rises and falls again.
• Shelter. Which side of the wall the sheep stand on, where small birds tuck themselves in, which trees still keep the ground dry beneath them.
• Life at ground level. Snails, slugs and worms out on the surface, and, on mild wet evenings in some places, frogs and toads on the move.
• The gap. What happens in the minutes after a shower passes: the first song, insects returning, the light on wet bark. Note the time it began.
• Sound. Rain on beech sounds different from rain on bracken or on still water, and you may never have listened for it on a dry day.

Keep what you saw apart from what you assume the weather caused. “No gulls on the estuary” is an observation. “Gulls driven inland by the storm” is a theory, and it needs a question mark unless you watched them go.

Do the same with numbers. “Had to lean into the wind to walk” is yours. “Gusts of 60 km/h” came from somewhere else, so name the forecast or weather station it came from.

Rescue the page the same day

The evening copy matters most after a wet day, since shorthand and smudges lose their meaning quickly. A short routine:

1. Dry the notebook. Stand it open away from direct heat, with kitchen paper between any soaked pages.
2. Write it out while you can still decode it. Keep the scrawled original. Where you cannot read a word, say so, or mark your reading as a guess. Do not tidy a smudge into a certainty.
3. Listen to the voice memos and type up what matters, with the times.
4. Add the official record on its own line. Rainfall from a nearby station or a river level can sit beside your notes, as long as you name the source and the two stay distinct.
5. Record the gaps. “Stopped writing at 12:10, too cold” explains a thin page to your future self, and stops you reading the silence as an empty landscape.

Publish it without the drama

A storm invites big words, and bad-weather posts tend to drift towards heroics. Try to let the rain do the work. Compare two invented lines:

An apocalyptic deluge battered the valley as we pressed on through nature’s fury.

By noon the lane was running like a stream, and the sheep had all moved to the far side of the wall.

The second gives a reader something to see, and it is probably the more frightening of the two. Be just as plain about your own decisions. If you crossed water you should have waited out, say that you should have waited, so the post does not read as an invitation. If you turned back, say so without apology.

Date everything, because high water and blocked paths go out of date within days. If people might walk from your post, separate the lasting route from the passing conditions, as we describe in Writing a trail note someone else can follow.

Finally, use the same tag on every rough-weather entry. Topic pages gather posts with the same tag, and the features page explains how they work. Over a few years, those entries become a record of how your patch copes with its worst days, which a run of sunny walks can never show you.

So take the pencil, keep the notes short and come home in good time. A smudged line with the time beside it is usually enough to get the whole day back.