Share your love of the natural world by contributing to our new feature called
"Naturalist Notes"
Avid photographer Robert Brown won first prize in the Fauna category for our 75th anniversary photo contest with this photo of a Yellow Crowned Night Heron
Naturalist Notes will be an opportunity to share your writing about how nature inspires you, new discoveries of plants and wildlife, photography that captures the wonder of nature.
From the time of the early European explorers of the American continent, detailed writings were made describing the flora and fauna and just plain awe of the natural world.
- In the summer of 1608, Captain John Smith made two voyages from Jamestown to explore the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries. Smith documented the natural environment, features of the land and waterways, and encounters with the Native peoples he met along the way.
- John James Audubon studied America's birds in the eighteenth century.
- The Lewis and Clark Expedition in the early nineteen century sketched and wrote aboutplants, animal life, and geography in the new territories they traveled.
- Later that centuryJohn Muir's writing would inspire our system of national and state parks.
- Emerson and Thoreau inspired us all to appreciate solitude and the beauty of nature.
If you would like to contribute, please email me the text and any pictures separately. If you don't have an appropriate photograph, we will choose one that works with your piece. If you are an artist and want to provide a sketch or drawing, if you can scan it or convert to an electronic file, we can use it. Photographs must be submitted as separate files but please indicate where each should go in your document. By submitting the article and any pictures to us, you give us full rights to use them.
We will share these Naturalist Notes on our social media sites and there will be a link off our Virginia Outdoors page for this special feature (as soon as we get enough content to have a good starting point).
Inspire a future generation of explorers of the natural world