If you go to your secret spot for an hour to watch the birds, and then sit at your desk to write in your journal and try to remember what happened in sequence, it’s almost impossible. A lot can happen in an hour.
Keeping a little notepad and pocket watch with you can be helpful. Eventually you’ll want to move away from using the pad and the watch, so that these skills develop in your mind, but in the beginning it’s very helpful.
While you’re sitting there you might notice that a bunch of little birds flew over, so you just note it down: little birds flew over going west to east over the pine trees. When you’re making notes, don’t make them too detailed. If you were at your secret spot for twenty minutes and it was totally silent, and then a robin started feeding and a thrush began to sing, you would write something like: 100pm I get to my spot. 110pm quiet. 120pm Robin feeding, thrush is singing.
Essentially what you’re doing is just making observations. What are the birds doing while I’m out here? That’s the whole idea. If you do this over and over, you begin to learn and understand the language of the birds.
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