About Fiona: Naturalist & Nature Journaler

​​​GALLERY OF JOURNAL PAGES
See examples from the more than 2,000 nature journal pages that Fiona has created since she began journaling in 2016. Fiona is also an Artist who especially enjoys drawing birds.

Learn more about Fiona:

• BIRDING, RESEARCH, & CONSERVATION
• TALKS & TEACHING
• PUBLICATIONS
• MEDIA & INTERVIEWS​​
• ART BY FIONA

Born and raised in Northern California, Fiona, age 20, is an avid birder, nature journaler, artist, naturalist, writer, actor, musician, and advocate for nature. A six-time recipient of the Central Valley Bird Club Youth Scholarship, she volunteers her time with research and conservation including bird surveys, nest box monitoring, bird banding, and bird walks. She has published essays in Birding magazine (the national magazine of the American Birding Association), on the Children & Nature Network's Finding Nature News Blog, on NatureJournalingWeek.com, and elsewhere (see Publications). She has taught classes and given talks for many organizations, including the Exploratorium in San Francisco, Environment for the Americas/World Migratory Bird Day, the San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory, Richardson Bay Audubon, the Point Reyes Birding Festival, and the Central Valley Bird Symposium. 

Fiona spends time daily in the wild lands near her home. She loves to look for mysteries in nature and explore them in the pages of her nature journal. Fiona attended Waldorf schools from age 3 to 18, where she enjoyed an education rich in music, storytelling, drama, science, literature, history, and the visual arts. 

​Fiona also loves to create art, draw, paint, craft, act (see her acting resume here), sing, harmonize, play cello, compose music, write stories, and speak German.​

QUOTES FROM FIONA
​"I think, now, in this moment in our world’s history, asking questions is vital to our survival. If we continue to fear questions, we will miss the opportunity to solve difficult problems and make the world a better place. One of the best questions I ever heard came from a Mary Oliver poem, 'The Summer Day': 'Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?' I now know my answer: I want to spend my life observing, wondering about, and standing in awe of nature and all it has to offer. But the awe is only the beginning: I want to spend my life taking care of nature and fighting to protect it. In order to do this, I will be carefully observing the natural world, writing and drawing a lot in my journal, and asking lots of questions."--Fiona Gillogly, from "A Birder’s Brain on Paper: How keeping a nature journal improves our birding experiences," published in Birding (the monthly magazine of the American Birding Association), June 2020.
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"As my mentor, John Muir Laws, says: 'Love is sustained, compassionate attention.'  When we give this kind of compassionate attention to the natural world, we fall in love with it. Nature journaling is one of the most powerful ways to fall in love with the natural world. And when we fall in love with the natural world, we are much more likely to protect it."
--Fiona Gillogly, from "Falling in Love with Nature Through Journaling," published in the Children & Nature Network Finding Nature News Blog, Summer 2021. ​

QUOTES ABOUT FIONA
"Fiona is the most curious person that I have met in all of my adventures. She has helped me up my personal level of curiosity with the world." --John Muir Laws, artist, scientist, educator, and author of the Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling

"On one of those field trips, I met someone who showed me how to regain my childhood sense of wonder. Her name is Fiona Gillogly, and she was thirteen at the time. A page from her journal is within this book and shows how our noticing infinite variations in nature enlarges our view of life. On field trips, I noticed that she was excited about everything—and not just the beautiful birds we all saw. She turned over the undersides of ferns as we walked into a woodland forest. She crouched down to show me a clump of California manroot and traced how far the vines extended and coiled around other plants. When making such discoveries in the field, she crammed her pages with questions about mysteries that lead to more mysteries, unmindful that her sentences are never formed in blocks of straight lines, left to right. Her observations flow continuously, curving upward or downward, as if to avoid interrupting her train of thought. John Muir Laws has been her mentor, and although I am now sixty-seven and she is now sixteen, she has become one of mine. " --Bestselling author Amy Tan, from the foreword to How to Teach Nature Journaling by John Muir Laws and Emilie Lygren (Heyday, 2020)
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