Here's a page from Maya's nature journal, copied exactly:
"Jan 19 2025. Long Pine Key. 47 degrees (COLD). Sunny later. Saw: red-shouldered hawk, 2 woodpeckers (red belly), 1 lizard (Nico caught it, I let it go). Heard: hawk screaming, Walt's truck. Mystery: a bird with a yellow chest that would not hold still."
Under that is a watercolor-pencil hawk on a pine branch, a smaller lizard with an arrow pointing at it labeled "NICO'S," and a tiny Pilot with lightning bolts coming out of the hood, which is how she remembers the dead battery.
How it started
Maya started the journal a year ago, on MLK weekend 2024, also at Long Pine Key. She was seven, I was cooking dinner, and she was bored in the specific way that means a kid is about to start poking her brother. Dana dug a small sketchbook out of her bag and said, "Draw something you've never seen at home." Maya drew a woodpecker on a slash pine. It looks more like a striped potato with a beak, and she'll tell you that herself. But she kept going.
For her eighth birthday last May she asked for a set of 24 watercolor pencils, the kind you draw with dry and then brush with water so they turn into paint. Now she carries the pencils, a water brush, a small hardback sketchbook and a binder clip for windy days, all in a zip bag. The zip bag is new since Flamingo in November, when our old tent leaked and one page got soaked. That page is still wavy. She drew a raindrop on it.
Her rules
Nobody handed her rules. She made them, and they haven't changed in a year:
- Every entry starts with the date, the place and the temperature, which she copies off my phone.
- Then three headings: Saw, Heard and Mystery. A mystery is anything she couldn't identify. We look those up at home in library books, and she writes the answer in a different color.
- At least one drawing a day, even a tiny one.
- Nothing gets picked or taken from a park. If she likes a flower or a shell, she draws it and leaves it.
That last rule came from a ranger talk at Jonathan Dickinson last spring, and she enforces it on her brother with real energy. (The yellow-chested mystery bird, by the way, turned out to be a pine warbler. It's written in green.)
What it changed for the rest of us
I didn't expect a kid's sketchbook to change how we camp. It did.
It slowed me down. I'm a PE teacher and a baseball coach, and my instinct on any trip is to keep everybody moving to the next thing. Maya can't draw a heron while being herded down a trail. Last March at Jonathan Dickinson I hurried her off a boardwalk because I wanted to beat the heat back to the car, and she lost a drawing she'd spent twenty minutes on and cried most of the way back. Since then we build in what we call journal time, about 20 minutes a day when nobody is going anywhere. I drink coffee and listen to the wind. It turns out I like it.
Dana started learning plant names because Maya kept asking and she didn't like not knowing. She now points out saw palmetto, wild coffee and cocoplum on every trail and quizzes me on them.
Nico became Maya's field assistant, a job he invented. He brings her sticks, rocks, beetles and, whenever he can catch one, an anole. She draws them, he lets them go, and his finds get their own corner of the page labeled "NICO'S." He's five and doesn't write much yet, so sometimes he dictates and she writes. His entry from Blue Spring last month reads, in full, "Manatees are big and they breathe loud."
At Blue Spring, Maya drew a manatee with three white scars after a volunteer explained that the staff tell individual animals apart by their scars. That one page sent her into a month of library books about manatees and sea turtles, and the sea turtles won. She now tells anyone who asks that she's going to be a marine biologist. She's eight. We'll see. But the journal is where it started.
Curry Hammock is at the end of March, and she's already written "MARATHON" at the top of the next blank page, in pencil, in case of a change of plans. She's hoping for a sea turtle. The binder clip is packed, because I told her about the wind.
