About Nature Punkz

Nature Punkz is a frugal, Midlands-based field journal: birds, citizen science, DIY kit, folklore, and punk ethics. I'm going to log my bad days as well as my good and bitch about the things that make our lives as part of this ecosystem harder.

What this site is

This is a practical nature blog built around a “local patch” approach: repeated visits to the same places, noticing what changes, and recording what’s there. Some posts are reflective and personal; others are closer to a field report.

The backbone is the Field Log location, weather, species, habitats, and how each encounter happened (seen, heard, photographed, etc.). That structure is there so you can browse by patterns rather than scrolling forever. Now this is clearly not perfect and one of the reasons for that is I didn't want this site to be backed by a database and burn trees every time somebody hits the front page.

What this site is not

Not a perfection project. Missed IDs, bad photos, and awkward days are part of the record.
Not “influencer nature”. The goal is clarity and honesty, not constant hype.
Not a gear flex. If something works on old kit, it belongs here.
But mostly it's about an imperfect person going to imperfect places and having perfectly valid experiences.

Who I am (and why I’m doing this)

I’m an unemployed fifty-something in the middle of England, short on money but stubbornly curious. Nature Punkz is a way to keep moving, keep learning, and keep building small, useful things while documenting what the patch is doing. After far too much time away from looking at nature everyday I noticed a lot has changed in a very short time. Now I want to document those changes because pretty soon they are going to affect all of us.

Neurodivergence and the patch

I’m autistic. That shapes how I notice patterns, how I handle noise and crowds, and how I recover. The patch approach fits: repeat visits, familiar routes, controlled variables, and enough novelty to stay interested without being overwhelmed.

Some posts may mention sensory load, burnout, routines, and coping strategies this is not inspiration porn. I'm not here to show you want an autistic person can do because you probably know a lot of us without even knowing it's about somebody doing something that most of us are able to do and if that inspires you to do something of your own that's gravy :)

Browse neurodivergence posts

Ethics, politics, and “punk nature”

You can’t write about nature and science without touching power: land use, climate, cruelty, access, and who gets heard. This site is openly anti-cruelty, and it treats the rise of authoritarianism and ecological collapse as real pressures, not abstract debates. We're each on this planet for a short time and if we don't do our best to improve something in our power then it's a life wasted.

I don't care if your politics don't align with mine. I don't want to hear about how *insert enemy of the week* is destroying nature. Natures main enemy is the constructions of man with capitalism the current worst enemy of the natural world and everything connected to it, including us. If you don't agree then carry on shouting in eco chambers on X. We don't have to listen and I won't.

Browse politics/ethics

How the Field Log works

Indexes

Field Notes — all posts with a Field Log
Locations — posts grouped by place
Species — species pages built from field observations
Habitats — observations grouped by habitat
Modifiers — seen/heard/photographed/etc.
Weather — posts grouped by conditions

What counts as an observation

Each post can include multiple observations. A single observation includes: species, encounter modifiers (seen/heard/photographed/videoed/signs), and habitat context.

Not every post will include a log because some posts aren't about what I've seen, heard, photographed but what I feel and what I feel doesn't come with documentation but it's just as valid an observation. Just less quantifiable :)

Why it’s structured

I've tried to give the observations structure so we can look back after a period and see what's changed (if anything), giving the potential, over a very long period, to see changes. To document if gut feelings are scientific. This is a long term project but it doesn't end with me. If I suddenly stop posting (use your imagination) then what I've seen, heard and experienced will remain and somebody can take that data, transform it into a format usable by them, and do some science. The reason we know so much about certain aspects of the planet is because people kept notes and later people looked at them. These days anybody can make these logs and be involved in citizen science long after they are gone.

At some point in the future I'll set up a script to transform the data I collect into an open data format and release it as a live document for easy use under an open licence.

DIY and frugal kit

A major theme here is doing good work with limited resources: second-hand gear, repaired kit, small home-built tools, and citizen science methods that don’t require expensive equipment.

I am a maker, I am a re-user, I love taking something and abusing it to do something else, I make no apologies for this.

At some point this site will contain a trove of reuse, reduce and recycled projects but at the moment it's pretty empty. A big part of hacker culture (in the original use of the word) is the sharing of resources and tools. One of the best examples of this in current western societies are the DIY, maker and Open Source communities which are different angles of the same cultural drive in my opinion. This site will showcase what other people have done and remix projects to local conditions and availability and make the transformed project available in an open format.

Browse DIY

Folklore and local nature lore

Nature has a shadow archive: seasonal customs, animal omens, place-stories, canal myths, and the strange ways people explain what they’ve seen. Folklore isn’t presented as “proof”; it’s treated as cultural data — meaningful either way.

You don't have to believe in something to give it space and respect. Sometimes I'll post about things that have no place in modern society or science. Sometimes I'll post things that are more than a little bit Woo and it doesn't matter. Here every idea gets equal respect until it's proven itself to a an arse so while you might niche ideas on folklore and spirituality presented with an open mind don't expect me to give the same space to organised religion or homopathy.

I live in The Black Country, I spend time in places with rich mythology, where modern humans have lived for thousands of years with 2000 years of documented history. I drive down roman roads from a place once considered Wales and a site of a battle between Saxons and Vikings to look at deer feeding in a place allegedly home to woodwoses and black eyed kids, we talk about who put Bella in the wytch elm, ghosts of canals and the moans of generations of miners buried with the coal they tried to extract. Just like you can't take the politics out of the science of the natural world you can't divorce it from the folklore and history either. I will try to combine all these factors together in a pleasing mix that doesn't offend modern science.

Browse folklore

Contact and reuse

If you want to reference something here, you can link to it. If you want to reuse images or audio, assume it’s © Nature Punkz unless a post says otherwise, and ask first. Ask nicely and I'll have no problem sharing my content with your blog or zine if it aligns with my views. Just ask :)

Some portions of the site will already have an explicit licence. This licence will almost always have some permissive nature meaning you don't have to ask but it would be nice to get a note from you telling me where you've used the content so I can enjoy it myself and perhaps pimp it on my socials. If you're sharing my content in an above board fashion then you're almost always going to have something else to interest me and I'd like to make that connection. :)