05 Feb 2026 5 min read

Your Local Nature Newsletter

Building community through nature

Creating community around nature observation with artist Perri Howard. Photo by David Lukas

Five years ago, I moved to a remote, rural area and started an experiment that has grown into a movement.

As a professional naturalist, I come from a long background of leading nature walks and giving talks. For many years, I lived in Northern California, where it was easy to connect with a wide range of audiences and offer hundreds of programs. But this easy-going flow was completely disrupted when I moved to a rural area in northern Washington, where it is almost impossible to find new audiences.

hiking in the mountains — Naturalists must strike that delicate balance between spending time alone in wild places and sharing their knowledge with people. Photo by David Lukas

For a while, this completely derailed me, but I love connecting with people and building community around our love of the natural world, so I decided to create a Facebook group called Methow Nature Notes, where folks could share observations, questions, and insights about the plants and animals in our rural valley.

Don't get me started on Facebook, but it turns out that a nature group is an ideal way to use Facebook. It's essentially a public bulletin board where people can post and share what they're seeing and wondering about, yet it's not intrusive because people can choose to view it or ignore it whenever they want. For example, I check the group every day to read and respond to posts that interest me, but I never switch over to scrolling through random Facebook posts so it doesn't suck up my time.

a sample Facebook page — Facebook can be an amazing forum for local wildlife observations. Image from Methow Nature Notes

This has been a fantastic experience, with a high level of conversation and many excellent questions and observations. Over the past five years, the group has grown to more than 4400 hundred followers, which might be half the people who live in our small valley (although many followers are visitors and fans of this area). It's like having 4400 sets of eyes watching the natural world every day and coming together to share what they're discovering, which deepens everyone's experience of this place.

people gathering at rafts — Gathering to learn about river ecology and management issues. Photo by David Lukas

On a personal level, this has been a rewarding experience because it motivates me to be outside every day, plus it offers me a platform where my nature observations, photographs, and insights have meaning; which is solid gold for a naturalist like me. It also gives me a calling card because I mention the Facebook group and invite people to join the group everywhere I go, and this has become another delightful way to widen the conversation.

David Lukas taking notes — My observations no longer languish in my field notebooks, but are now shared with a large and highly engaged audience. Photo by Jade Wolff

However, one thing I soon noticed is that there are a surprising number of people who detest or will never use Facebook, so I realized that a lot of very interested people had no way to be part of the conversation. This prompted me to start the Methow Nature Notes newsletter, as a place where I could highlight the week's top observations and provide a week-by-week summary of the changing seasons. While Facebook is random and unfocused, a newsletter has the advantage of being curated and providing space for deeper dives into specific topics. Even better, the newsletter is freely available to everyone, so everyone gets to be part of the conversation.

Why am I telling you this? I'm sharing this because I believe this model could be replicated in every part of the country. Tracking nature observations over the changing seasons and creating community around a shared love of the natural world is incredibly important, but we tend to let established nature clubs and organizations take the lead on this. Why not create this ourselves and have fun doing it?

people hiking in snow — A community-led wildlife tracking workshop. Photo by David Lukas

The sky is the limit here, so if you, or someone you know, loves the natural world and is looking for a great project, this might be something worth considering. I'm happy to chat with anyone who's interested in learning more, plus I've created a presentation explaining how to start your own nature newsletter that I can offer for interested groups.

I get excited whenever I discover opportunities for hope and ways to take charge of our destiny. We all need more of that in our lives, and creating a local nature newsletter is one way to do this.

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Feel free to share this newsletter with anyone who might be interested. And please consider helping support my effort to produce these newsletters by upgrading to a paid subscription or making a one-time donation. All of my work is entirely supported by followers like you.

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There are many great nature newsletters, and if there is already one in your community, please follow and support them in this work. One example is Ted Levin's delightful newsletter, Another Morning in Paradise, which tracks the changing seasons around his Vermont home. Ted also turned his newsletter posts into a popular book, The Promise of Sunrise: Finding Solace in a Broken World, which was published in 2025.