Notebooks

Pentti Linkola watched birds with binoculars and wrote journal-like notes in pencil in his black-cover notebooks. The notes included the weather at his watching spot, a description of the landscape and other observations. As for birds, he wrote down details such as the observation spot, the bird’s behaviour and information about the condition of the nest and the number of nestlings. When out on his trips, he spent all his leisure time writing the notes. His handwriting is not easy to read, since the text is small and includes shorthand.

Linkola wrote up his notes in a multi-step process. He typed simple bird observations into separate folders with his typewriter. As for the content of his notebooks, Linkola wrote this up by hand into separate hardback journals. As his work progressed, he crossed out the parts he had written up, as can be seen in the two notebooks from 1966 donated to the museum.

Pentti Linkola did not finish writing up all of his notebooks. According to his daughter Leena Linkola, he had sometimes calculated that he would have to live to 150 in order to be able to write up all his notebooks. And there were always new observations to record.