#DailyNature Closing Notes [Dec 15 - 31] : Goodbye 2025
Contributions from the #DailyNature community, environmental look-back for 2025 and owls, owls, owls
The world is marble. Cool, smooth, soft on ground, jasmine petal snow that glows luminescent under a distant Jaffacake wolf moon. Blue tailed comets swim faintly behind stars. If you listen closely the slow exhale of winter can not be heard, as quiet country is the gift of visible wintered ground.
Happy Twelfth Night! Tonight marks the last of the twelve days of Christmas, the day most decorations come down in the UK (in case of bad luck, January 6th). The week where the world begins to tilt brighter and the epiphany feast takes place for those who celebrate. For myself, I’ve always liked to enter the new year a little slowly, the first week in January is the easing back week. I have to apologise for a late post on our #dailynature challenge. I hope you don’t mind too much that last year leeks into the new one - a fact that usually occurs in all lives around this date anyway. Between sickness and celebrations a pause was needed, and enjoyed.
Since we last met, Mari Lwyd has already rattled their pale skull through twisted ribbons and shining baubles to ride out the darkness and usher in the daylight. The solstice passed, rather greyly for myself, but as secretly suspected. We spun slightly forward, a bit like a death drop rollercoaster that pauses you as you gaze into the abyss - the sunrise got later despite promises of brighter days. Yet its all working, all moving. In the eye of the seasons, a year may not even be a full blink.
Now we await Imbolc and spring, our next month-long nature challenge. In-between I will do just one nature review a month and encourage you all, as always, to get out in nature and continue to share your daily experiences…
Soft wing-tips tap boat window as they sprawl to glide down the wet-way, drifting into the night. The screech comes loud and clear, not at all dreamlike but as though a Valkyr is out to bring your soul to war. I sit up and listen to the creatures debate proximity for what seems like hours, awake with the night’s sweet feathers.
Do you remember the owls I mentioned a few weeks ago? My subconscious waiting for one hoot to give another hoot in return rendering me an insomniac under a full winter moon? It would seem they’ve found one another, and me. Perhaps it really was a burgeoning romance after all. Owls, all owls, feel special to me. Particularly in winter, as the evenings settle-in, so do the chances of seeing these magnificent beings. This is an excellent time of year to hear and see owls in action, summer may be for the dawn chorus, but winter is for the night owls.
Owls have never really felt like birds to me, they’re something in-between. In South American cultures, owls are seen as witches and are sung to, in an attempt to get rid of the bad spirit. If you haven’t seen it already there’s a funny video on the internet where an entire Mexican church sings to an owl and the owl refuses to leave because it’s clearly enjoying the beats. This is how I see owls: sassy, magical, sarcastic and just minding their own business - slightly oblivious, sometimes, to the rest of the world.
The kinship I feel with owls makes any owl sighting a lifer bird moment for me. A lifer bird, is a birding term for significant birds you have seen… as a very indecisive person, deciding which birds are lifers and which aren’t fills me with guilt - like they’ll overhear my choices and shit-target me for the rest of my life, therefore, I confess, all birds end up as lifers for me.
This year I want to increase my birding knowledge a little more. I don’t count birds in tallies, I’m not quite there yet as I’m still trying to recognise them confidently by eye at all. Identifying a red kite by silhouette this summer in Somerset from a moving car is one of my 2025 highlights. Being cheek to cheek with a hovering white tailed eagle at the edge of the Isle of Skye and recognising a description of a bird’s call in South Africa by a roadside, from a fleeting conversation, are close seconds. Birds whisping through daily nature but landing like feathers to memory, soft and full of wishes. Each year I take notice, they become more and more precious to the equation of my life, how about you?
There are two types of owl families:
Strigidae: the most common known as ‘true owl’, of which tawny owls belong to
Tytonidae: lesser common, that barn owls belong to.
Owls have a particular connection to Christmas in the northern hemisphere, when the nights are long and you’re a nocturnal hunting animal, you accidentally become a symbol of events taking place. In Europe owls tend to be associated with wisdom, such as the Greek goddess Athena, many universities don owls as their mascot. As a child I envisioned the original wise men as owls due to this cross over.
In the UK owls are also seen as guides and protectors, befitting for why Harry Potter has Hedwig to deliver important magical news (though in a rather now ironic mistake, Rowling misgendered Hedwig by basing Hedwig’s description closer to that of a male snowy owl than a female). Sweden sadly this year announced that snowy owls are technically extinct within their boundaries despite the country being a traditional breeding ground. There have been great efforts in the UK this year to increase owl breeding too, as their numbers continue to decrease.
Owls are a little like the snow outside my window: mysterious, knowing, sorrowful. So sorrowful that Wordsworth and Blair famously used them as birds of doom in their poetry.
Again! the Screech-Owl shrieks: Ungracious Sound! I'll hear no more, it makes one's Blood run chill
The Grave, Robert Blair, 1743
Luckily for me, an unmarried wench, the Welsh believe that an owl’s hoot is to signify an unwedded women - so perhaps I will see some owl amigos after all. An eternal call for a girls night out perhaps? Confusingly their hoot is also seen as a blessing for a wedded woman’s pregnancy… (perhaps the romantic poets feared the call of their mistresses ruin and called that doom?) Either way, the owls don’t seem to be concerned with men folk much in UK folklore, despite many of our fictional owls being male.
The first time I saw an owl in the wild it was a barn owl, its heart-shaped face pointed down over a field near the canal in deep concentration. The exact same field (in Staffordshire) I saw a meteor burn up in flames in the sky and vanish - a close falling star on the canal, just a few weeks later. No wonder I still associate them with mysticism. Those I’m hearing recently are tawny owls, these are what you heard just before, recorded passing my boat window. I’ve no doubt I won’t see these birds, I’ll be moving along soon and it wouldn’t be the first time I stayed up at night listening to creatures only to never spot them. A wing touching the window like a ghosts footprint is more than I could hope for.
#DailyNature Fortnightly Review & End of December
Thank you as always for your beautiful words, images and drawings you send, centred on the nature in your world. It’s been especially lovely to look at these whilst I’ve been a little under the weather and around such a special time of year.
As mentioned previously, our next community month-long challenge will take place in March to celebrate Imbolc and the coming of Spring. In-between I will post just one Monthly Nature Review update on Substack for those who wish to keep contributing in the meantime.
Looking back over 2025, the year feels distinctly different during our community months. My phone is stuffed full of photographs, poetry, notes, sketches and observations - my home is littered with dried and jarred clippings. I cannot fully express my joy that others have also wished to join me in sharing their inspiration during these times. But I wish to keep encouraging small breaks between the month-long challenges - after all it’s about being in nature daily. Being online is the third space we use to have our very own show and tell, our social spot, so keeping the balance is key to the equilibrium.
Below are some of my favourite contributions to the last two weeks of the #DailyNature December challenge:
First is from Charlie Alice Raya ( IT'S OUR WORLD ) , a message to take us forward into the changing of the season. Followed by another poem of hers encountering one of the corvid family - corvid’s are some of my favourite birds, they have such individual personalities and are known for their intelligence. They’re also seen as prolific mystics in much of Celtic lore, messengers between the thin veil.
I loved this short clip and words from Peter G Knight, I have been repeating them as I walked the canal. ‘The moon in a bucket. The sky in the palm of my hand.’ is such a romantic and relatable notion. I often spend time in awe looking at the full moon in double on the canal, illuminating the night, considering how pools of water are the ancients form of a night light.
Martin Brown connects a living lexicon with ecological spiral patterns, clarifying our ongoing development as people and our understanding of the world in an artistic swirl of a sentence. His contribution to the solstice invokes quiet and attention too - ‘hush’ might be one of my favourite words, or rather ‘huisht now’ as my nan would say.
This beautiful capture by Michael Jones of gorse against a black backdrop is exquisite. It’s shape reminds me of the plants in Super Nintendo’s Mario, the corrogated dew along it’s lips like glistening teeth.
Tine Kerdraon Hascoet contributed this image of wild fennel from Kerlouan, entitling it "Little spiders in the sky", I love the playfulness of this description as spiders almost trying to web their way to the clouds.
Richard Goode ( Nighttime on Still Waters) contributed so much beautiful poetry this month it was hard to decide what to share. Here are my favourite two pieces, one depicting an old oak as a wise and wild woman. The other a meditation on the silent slide into a new year, a perfect way to end our community round up.
Here are my own #DailyNature contributory notes from the past fortnight
Day 15 - Day 16 - Day 17 - Day 18 - Day 19 - Day 20 - Day 21 - Day 22 - Day 23 - Day 24 - Day 25 - Day 26 - Day 27 - Day 28 - Day 29 - Day 30 - Day 31
Environmental News: Lookback on 2025
A few pieces of happy news on the environment from 2025, please add anymore you have to the comments on this post.
Green Turtles are no longer on the brink of extinction, with 2025 seeing significant progress in their reproduction!
The hole in the ozone layer is healing and could be fully repaired by 2066!
The world’s largest marine protected area was established in Polynesia.
Renewable energy surpassed fossil fuel in May 2025 and is being noted as passing the positive impact point - we are on our way up!
There were multiple advances in enviro-sciences including green concrete and bio-tar (taking waste thought to be unusable and detrimental to the environment but instead creating bio-carbon which can be used flexibly for many things including water purification), read this amazing list here from The Week for more information.
Scientist’s have bread less methane-producing cows! Stink-tastic!
Look Forward on the Blog
This year I have a few projects I’d like to trial out on this blog, but I’m taking January slowly, as there’s actually so much already going on behind the scenes. Most importantly Water Book Club will be beginning at the end of this month! I have some exciting author interviews, writing workshops and feature blogs coming up. Thank you so much for the positive response on this project, if you would like to contribute a piece of water writing or suggest a book please let me know in the Subchat or comments below!
Now - Go forth into the new year and new projects with joy and care!
Brilliant scenes! I love every one of them.
I absolutely love owls so this was a treat! Thank you for sharing, Jen ❤️