Every tree, star, and cloud is a compass — if you know how to read them

Drop me off in a city without a compass and a destination, and I will eventually find my way. For whatever reason, I’ve always had an intuitive sense of how to navigate urban environments. Maybe it has to do with being my father’s shotgun-seat navigator on road trips, but honestly, it probably has more to do with my spending too much of my youth navigating the video game environments of Hyrule and Vice City.

But drop me off in the middle of the woods with a destination, and you’d better tell the park rangers what you did, or I’m in trouble. Give me a compass if you want; the only difference will be the false sense of confidence I’ll take with me while getting lost.

I have always found this to be disappointing. I want to be more of an outdoorsman, to explore the natural world with more confidence and see it, at least in part, like our ancestors did. Because of that, I’ve recently gotten into the writings of Tristan Gooley, a navigator who specializes in interpreting natural signs. His books — such as The Natural Navigator (2011), The Secret World of Weather (2022), and How to Read a Tree (2023)  — teach readers how to read the clues nature provides for a richer connection with the world around them.

In advance of his newest book, The Hidden Seasons (2025), I spoke with Gooley about his journey toward natural navigation, why these skills are important in the 21st century, and how someone even as hopeless as I am on a trail can begin to find their way out in the woods.

(This interview has been edited for both length and clarity.)

Big Think: How did your fascination with navigating nature and reading its clues begin?

Gooley: My path was atypical. I was not that kid crawling around with a magnifying glass at age 10, looking for butterflies and creepy crawlies. There was a period where I would say I had very little interest, and if I’m being blunt, nature was the green stuff that got in my way.

[But] as I grew up, I decided I wanted to hone that skill. Most of us work out, including myself, that we’re pretty bad at quite a few things, and I got a strong sense as I moved into young adulthood that I would be more comfortable if I mastered a skill. Navigation was the logical one for me.

That led to a hobby becoming a passion, and I began crafting journeys. I was constantly trying to push my skills, and it led to some quite interesting journeys. A friend and I tried to get from England to the highest point in North Africa and back under our own steam. We sailed a small boat, flew a light aircraft, drove a four-by-four vehicle up into the mountains and then went on foot.

I wasn’t really seeking adrenaline or adventure; the prime goal for me was mastering this skill of shaping journeys.

By my mid-twenties, I found that the excitement had disappeared. On paper, I was doing these incredible, exciting journeys, but they didn’t resonate with me. I was about to set off across a desert or an ocean, and I would have this sad, hollow feeling. I thought, That’s not right.

I eventually came across the idea of finding your way with low tech or no tech. I decided to play with that a bit, and it was the stick of philosophical dynamite. My whole brain and senses lit up and went, “This is what you’ve been missing.” I still do the conventional navigation stuff, but I started to use every spare minute to understand the methods that our ancestors used [to navigate nature].

Big Think: Can you unpack that experience a bit more?

Gooley: Like most of us, I came across ideas like you can find your way using the stars and Sun, or moss grows on the north side of a tree. I thought, “Well, if I’m lucky, there might be 12 methods that work. Let’s go find those.”

Direction-finding proved a good way into the subject, but one of the biggest transformations was mapmaking. If we take the view that things aren’t random, then every planet, every animal, every cloud, every star we are seeing is where we see it [for a reason]. Nature is brutally competitive. Every organism is competing with perhaps a thousand others, so by the time we see a plant, a butterfly, or a deer, what it is saying to us in ecological and habitat terms is that 1,000 other species tried to make this spot home, but I won. If we give an organism curiosity, it whispers back something. The willow trees are there because that’s where water is. That’s mapmaking. 

I eventually realized that it’s not 100 or even 1,000 methods that can help us. This is infinite. And that was hugely exciting to me. I now take the view that if I had 100 lifetimes, I’d be very lucky to have scratched the surface of this subject.

[Of course], when I’m teaching and writing about it, I am careful with that sort of language. I don’t want anyone to be overwhelmed. I don’t want people to think that it’s the deep end or nothing. When I’m sharing this knowledge, I’m always saying to go in the way I did and have fun with these dozen techniques I’m going to share with you. And then by the time you’re thinking, “Ah, that’s easy! I can kind of do that in my sleep,” add another dozen, and then move towards the idea that everything we see makes sense. 

Big Think: Why would people in our modern day — whose only real nature-based concern may be watering the succulent on their office desk — want to nurture these skills?

Gooley: I would say it’s much more cultural and has to do with cerebral reward than anything pragmatic. Most people who read my books will never need them in a survival sense at any point, and that’s certainly not why I write them. I genuinely believe some of these skills are part of the full human experience. 

We as a species are not actually all that impressive compared to the animal kingdom. We’re not that strong. We’re not that fast. Our senses aren’t all that amazing, and yet we’ve done pretty well as a species. Some people would argue that’s a different conversation, but my feeling is that we’re clearly good at something, and we all know it has to do with what is going on between our ears. Our brain is our super organ.

A deer, squirrel, and bird may pick up on each other’s alarm calls as part of a neighborhood-watch scheme. Evolution has given them a simple, effective reading of their environment.

But what animals aren’t doing — to the best of our knowledge — is thinking, “Okay, that’s a 10-day-old moon. That means a neap tide is round about. I also noticed the wind change this morning from the way the birds are facing, and those clouds mean that we’ve got another weather change coming. I’m not going to go fishing tonight. I’m going to wait.”

That type of deductive process, sensing the landscape, and building a more interesting, richer jigsaw of what’s going on around us [is part of being human]. And in a sort of historical sense, if you can predict which way an animal is going to go, then you don’t really need to be stronger or faster than it.

Big Think: And then how does your newest book, Hidden Seasons, fit into that?

Gooley: There are two things I’m trying to do in the book. In one sense, it’s an almanac. I’m telling people who are interested in nature clues what to look for each month. It’s a step-by-step through the year. [For example], in late summer, we can understand the patterns that lead to storms and predict whether a storm is going to hit us and how that’s going to play out.

The other thing I’m trying to do is explain how the seasons work, almost like a clock. We’re all aware that certain things happen at certain times of the year, but it’s not the same each year because temperatures are different. So, I explained how the seasons actually work — for example, how the plants and animals know what time of year it is.

And if you put those two pieces together, I’m trying to give the reader the opportunity to go out with an analytical toolkit to understand why this or that is happening [when it does].

Big Think: What’s a principle or practice you would recommend to someone who’s just starting out with nature navigation?

Gooley: If you want a simple exercise, you can find an area that you don’t know like the back of your hand and try to find north by just using your senses. If you have no building blocks, the exercise is fascinating. You’ll get a sense of frustration because you’ll know there has to be to solve this. The puzzle must have a solution. It’s getting over that initial kind of hill by learning a few building blocks — such as the Sun being due south in the middle of the day. 

Now, you may get lucky, and the Sun’s out, and it’s all too easy. Maybe not. That’s when I say to people that natural navigation doesn’t stop when you’ve got that answer. You can try to work out north by using the Sun, moon, stars, plants, animals, wind, weather, buildings. Nothing is off limits. So long as it’s not as a tool, it’s perfectly all right to use the satellite dish, which will point towards the equator, or the alignment of a church. That’s the way in; that’s the door open.

Big Think: Speaking of satellite dishes, how do these principles work in what we would traditionally think of as manmade environments, such as cities, parks, suburbs, and the like?

Gooley: Definitely. Very similar things are going on in an urban environment. [For example], if you open a cafe where people don’t regularly walk, it’s not going to be there in two years. That’s stating the obvious, but there is an interesting, more subtle truth within that: We can think of humans as animals in their migratory habits.

If you see a bird flying in any one direction, you might get something interesting from that, but you wouldn’t want to set off on a 10-day oceanic voyage based on that. But if you see thousands of birds flying in one direction at a certain time of the year, and six months later you see them coming back, it doesn’t take a Holmsian step to work out there’s probably an island somewhere out there.

We do exactly the same thing in towns and cities. If you see lots of people heading in a direction, there’s going to be a reason for it. One person might be having an odd day, but 100 people probably aren’t, so then we just quiz it. 

At the start of the day, if you go against the flow, you’ll find a transit station. In the middle of the day, particularly in the summer months, people tend to migrate from office areas towards parks. If you’re looking for a hospital, you’re probably getting warm when you pass the florist. If you’re looking for fast food, find the secondary school.

You know, we’re doing this all the time without necessarily thinking of it. If you look at the way somebody crosses the road, the length of time they pause on the sidewalk before stepping off will tell you how local they are, because locals are constantly developing their awareness and sense of what the traffic patterns are.

I was working in Texas a couple of years ago, and I couldn’t work out what was going on. I was on the sidewalk for probably a quarter of an hour, and there were five lanes [of traffic] in each direction, which is an odd environment for a Brit. I finally worked out what I was meant to do, whereas the locals wouldn’t even appear to stop. It all comes back to this very simple principle; nature is plastered all over it.

Big Think: What is the importance of bringing in different disciplines, like science, history, or folklore, into nature navigation?

Gooley: I take the view that anything that brings you to the table is working, so I’m not anti-anything. All of my work is based on science, and I find that folklore quite often hints at something interesting, but I don’t want to take any folklore at face value. 

[That said,] we don’t need to understand the science for something to be practical. We have to remember that our ancestors were very fluent with these techniques, and they weren’t sitting around reading the latest nature journals. What they were doing was pairing pattern recognition with meaning — to bring it back to our fundamental human experience.

It is possible to do that without the science in the middle, but I find the science accelerates the process. If you are prepared to spend 10 years walking around in the wild, your brain will do that pairing, but science can accelerate it.

Big Think: Anything you would like to add to this conversation?

Gooley: If learning the names of things puts you off and isn’t helpful, then don’t do it. Go just stand next to a lake or the sea and just notice things. You don’t need to know the names of any of the trees or the animals you see, but you will notice them change. If you do that exercise, maybe three or four times over the course of a couple weeks, your brain will take the shortcut for you.

What our ancestors did is notice how the plants and animals change. You don’t need to know the names. You don’t need to read any science. You can still do pattern recognition and pairing and have the same neural pathways get excited.

And it is an exciting moment when you’re walking and your brain suddenly says to you, “By the way, you are about to find some water,” and you do.