Birds on the Brain

alisonborealis:

just-breezy:

During his 6-week trek through the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California, Kolby Kirk  diligently kept a journal.  Read more about Kolby Kirk’s Sierra Trek and see more scans of his journal.

This is amazing and beautiful, and the culmination of SO MUCH HARD WORK.

While teaching field school, we tell everyone that they should keep a journal of all their work and observations etc. Most students forget. Those that remember jot down point form  notation about the bearings they took on their treks, the vegetation communities and terrain they travelled through, but it’s all really brief, and written in the most perfunctory of chicken-scratched writing.

To have drawn and coloured all of this: the butterfly wings, the contours and general terrain mapping, this fellow was either an insomniac or the one who contributed least to general camp work and activities. Plus he probably carried a butterfly net with him and must have had a photographic memory, or he delayed a lot of the travel by stopping to draw things as he saw them.

This work is beautiful, but it would have been A LOT of work. The only time i got any good drawings in my field notes was when I was the note-taker during data collection and something landed on my data sheet.