Fiona Gillogly, age 18, has loved art and nature since she was a little girl. In 2016, when she discovered nature journaling and the work of John Muir Laws, she was thrilled to find something that combined these two things she adored. Fiona has become a passionate nature journaler and naturalist, and she has completed more than 2,000 journal pages since she began journaling. Born and raised in the Sierra Foothills near Auburn, California, Fiona enjoys looking for mysteries in nature and exploring them in the pages of her nature journal. Fiona also loves to draw, paint, craft, act, sing, harmonize, play cello and ukulele, compose music, write stories, and speak German. An avid birder since 2015, Fiona is a six-time recipient of the Central Valley Birding Club Youth Scholarship, enabling her to attend summer teen birding camps to further develop her skill and passion in birding. An avid musician, composer, and singer, Fiona especially enjoys the music of birdsong and she loves to bird by ear. Over the last several years, Fiona has volunteered many hours bird banding, monitoring nest boxes, and helping with Christmas Bird Counts, gaining valuable hands-on experience in field research as well as the opportunity to observe birds up close. In June 2020, the American Birding Association’s Birding magazine published Fiona’s article and illustrations,
“A Birder’s Brain on Paper: How keeping a nature journal improves our birding experiences.” She has also published essays and illustrations on the
Children & Nature Network's Finding Nature News Blog, on
NatureJournalingWeek.com, and elsewhere.
Fiona has taught classes and given talks on birding and nature journaling for many organizations, including Audubon California, the Exploratorium in San Francisco, Environment for the Americas/World Migratory Bird Day, the San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory, the Point Reyes Birding Festival, the Wild Wonder Nature Journaling Confernece, and the Central Valley Bird Symposium. Fiona is one of several naturalists who contributed interviews and nature journal pages to the book
How to Teach Nature Journaling by John Muir Laws and Emilie Lygren (Heyday, 2020). Fiona is also an artist with a line of blank greeting cards featuring her nature art. Visit her web site for links to her writing and talks, sample nature journal pages, and her art cards.
www.fionasongbird.com