| Back in the diary’s earliest years, there was but one writer, Thomas Coward in Cheshire, who, God forbid, had to file an article to his editor every single day. At first principle, you could hardly find a more suitable subject for a daily series than the natural world. After all, wildlife has evolved a truly dizzying array of creatures, and accompanying ways to survive and thrive – of late, readers have learned about rare glow-worms, deadly thorn apple, and strange magpie behaviour. But the diary is also far from just a “what species is that?” column: recently, we’ve had our resident farmers writing on the post-budget protests and the return of bovine TB. Last month, we had Mark Cocker waxing about the hunter’s moon in Burnlaw, Northumberland, and Nicola Chester (from Berkshire) celebrating the 100th birthday of her rural village hall; further back we had Phil Gates (County Durham) on “footpath furniture”. Soon, on the winter solstice, we’ll have a dispatch from Mary Montague in Northern Ireland, about the remarkable Newgrange in County Meath, a neolithic monument that is designed to be illuminated as the shortest day of the year begins. Like many of its writers (I suspect), the diary rises early, publishing at 5.30am, and I’m told that for many readers it is part of their morning routine, taken with a cup of tea and Wordle, or with a takeaway coffee on a packed train. In a world of hard edges and relentlessly hard news, it provides some brief respite, taking you out into the fields, the woods or the garden for your daily constitutional. I’d also like to think that it contains a little of that vanishingly scarce commodity: charm. As with anything related to nature, of course, there is also grave news to be found; indeed, the diary is fundamentally a piece of journalism, so it is duty-bound to report on the climate crisis and its effects on species and systems. Our fine writers can at least bring some elegance and/or anger to the topic. Some notable examples I can recall are Paul Evans’s damning diary after the 2022 heatwave, and the bittersweet chase that Charlie Elder undergoes to see the increasingly rare cuckoo in the Dartmoor mist. One of the true values of the diary is that, having run for so long, it is now a vast document that tells the story of British wildlife and rural affairs over the past 120 years – from the modernisation of agriculture to the winners and losers in our index of species. On that note, it is worth mentioning that the daily diary is sometimes accompanied by an archive diary too, written on the same day of the year in past decades. These show the cumulative importance of all those daily snapshots. Archive pieces can be startling to read, with their casual references to, say, seeing nightingales or turtle doves as if they weren’t critically endangered; or their passing mentions to God Save the King (the 1940s version), mead or horse-drawn ploughs. But they are also reassuring, bringing home the resilience and constancy of nature: while everything else changes, the first butterfly of spring or a flock of long-tailed tits look the same today as they ever did, and draw the same responses. In September this year, a Country diary “best of” called Under the Changing Skies was published by Faber. It covers the period between 2018 and 2024 – a drop in the ocean of the ongoing, living record that is the diary. While I couldn’t begin to be a student of the entire span of the diary since its inception all those years ago, what I can vouch for is the brilliance, dedication and love for the subject that the current crop of writers have, all of which is borne out in this collection. And you never know, perhaps the diary will still be going in 120 years time. Paul Fleckney is editor of the Country diary. To catch up on the daily series, click here. The Guardian is also taking submissions for this winter’s Young country diary, until Friday 3 January. Read more of the Country diary: | 