Bur Oak Botanicals: 2016

I mentioned in a previous post that I had been working on a new project, well here it is.

I have always kept lists of the birds I see in the field while working on different projects or simply bird watching, but I have never had a notebook dedicated to birds. Last fall I decided I was going to find and buy a birding notebook and start keeping a life list on January 1st 2016. Well, I couldn't find what I wanted on Google. I found some artsy handmade ones on Etsy and some hurricane-proof Rite-in-the-Rain ones, but I wanted something durable enough to last a month in my back pocket but cheap enough to justify having a new one each month.

I found pocket notebooks for beer drinkers, stargazers, wine sippers, comic book artists and even cheese tasters but not for birders, so I decided to make my own!

Then I started thinking how cool it would be if each notebook featured a bird portrait and a cover color to represent that bird - a small feature that would keep the notebooks fresh and completed ones would create a rainbow of birding adventures on my shelf. So I started with some herons...