“my birding journey; from indifference to obsession”

Let’s get one thing out of the way immediately: I am not an ornithologist. I don’t have a degree on the wall, a taxonomic thesis gathering dust, or a childhood memory of deciphering bird calls wth a grandparent. What I have is a slightly obsessive nature, a Canon R6 Mark II with a 100–500mm lens, and a growing suspicion that birds are the most interesting thing I have ever pointed a camera at. Which, given that I have spent the better part of my adult life pointing cameras, keyboards, and considerable creative energy at most things worth paying attention to, is saying something.

My name is Petra Hughes and I came to birding the way most people come to their greatest passions — sideways, and without adequate warning.

I am a Sunshine Coast woman by home and by heart, but for the past three years I have been living in Darwin, which was supposed to be a one-year adventure for my husband’s work and became, almost immediately, something we couldn’t bring ourselves to leave. Darwin does that. The light is different here. The birds are extraordinary.

It was Darwin that cracked me open as a birder. The sheer abundance and variety of birdlife in the Top End — the kingfishers, the raptors, the honeyeaters working the garden before the sun has properly decided to rise — made it impossible to stay incurious. I started looking. Then I started really looking. Then I started buying lenses. You know how this goes.

The camera came first — a 300mm lens, generously given by a good friend who clearly understood what they were starting. I have since upgraded to the Canon R6 Mark II with a 100–500mm lens, and I am beginning to experiment with video, which is its own particular adventure. My photographs are real — sometimes gloriously so, occasionally frustratingly so. I have a particular affection for the tangle of twigs and branches that photographic purists might call clutter and I call context. That mess of sticks and bark in the background? That is the habitat. That is where the bird actually lives. I want you to see it.

I remember those very first bird photographs. It was a dawn visit to Fogg Dam, a popular spot a short drive from Darwin, just after the wet with my lovely daughter-in-law. The causeway, at a trickle, was filled with birds I had no names for. It was the first time I had picked up my camera in months and the maiden voyage for the 300mm lens. I had no idea what settings I should use, but snapped away in blind faith, treating the birds like the plates of food I was more accustomed to photographing. It was when I got home and downloaded those images that my life irreversibly changed.

Beyond the camera, my relationship with birds runs a little deeper than general enthusiasm. I am a registered wildlife carer, and over the years I have raised and rehabilitated an eclectic variety of birds — from tiny nestlings who arrived weighing less than a thought, to fledglings who needed a few weeks of supervised chaos before they were ready to be returned to the world. That experience shapes the way I observe. When I am watching a species in the field, I am often thinking about behaviour, diet, nesting preferences, developmental stages — the kind of detail that matters when you are trying to give a small creature its best possible chance at survival. The wildlife care stories live on my personal blog, Pebbles and Pomegranate Seeds, which has been my creative home for years and which I will freely admit has been somewhat neglected lately, for reasons that involve a great deal of time spent outdoors with binoculars.

This website — Birding in Australia — is something different. It is where the birding lives exclusively: the species profiles, the location guides, the photography, the taxonomy rabbit holes, the field notes scribbled in the margins of good mornings. Creating it was, in many ways, a natural extension of who I am. I have been building websites professionally for years through my studio, Pebbles Ink, and I have form when it comes to turning a passion into a reference. Back in 2006, I became enamoured with food — properly, obsessively enamoured — and I responded by creating a regional food directory for the Sunshine Coast, writing books, and producing a regional food magazine. That is what I do. I find a thing that matters to me and I build something around it that might be useful to other people who feel the same way.

Birding in Australia is that project, for this chapter. A reference guide, a field companion, a personal journal, and eventually — if I put in the hours it deserves — something genuinely valuable for anyone who has discovered birds and wants to go deeper.

I should be honest with you about where we are right now. Every website starts with structure before it gets to soul, and this one is still finding its feet. There is a great deal I want to share, and not enough hours in the day — particularly when a good portion of those hours are, unrepentantly, spent outside. The grand plan is to travel Australia with my husband, birding our way through habitats I have never set foot in, photographing species I have only read about, and writing it all down here. We are building it. Slowly, carefully, with real photographs and real field notes and a real love for the subject. Sometimes I fall down research rabbitholes — I will share those discoveries here, too.

I am not an expert. I am a passionate, curious, wildlife-caring, lens-wielding, Sunshine Coast–born, Darwin-converted, perpetually distracted lover of birds who is making her way through this the same way most of the best things get done — one morning at a time, birding app in hand, binoculars around the neck, completely unable to walk past a tree without looking up.

A word to the more experienced birders and ornithologists who may have wandered in here: you are very welcome, and I mean that sincerely. But you will almost certainly find things to disagree with, depth that doesn’t quite satisfy, or a taxonomic rabbit hole I’ve described with enthusiasm rather than rigour. I am comfortable with that. You also, let’s be honest, don’t need a guide — you’ve known where the birds are since before I owned a pair of binoculars. This website was built for the person I was not very long ago: someone who looked up one morning, noticed a bird they couldn’t name, felt something shift, and suddenly needed to know everything. It is for the beginner who doesn’t yet know they’re a birder. For the person whose interest has quietly become something more, and who just needs a little company and a little hand-holding until they find their own feet — and their own favourite patch, their own morning ritual, their own inexplicable attachment to a species that stopped them in their tracks one ordinary day and never quite let go.

Welcome. I am very glad you found your way here and I hope you will join me in exploring Australia, one bird at a time.

You can browse  ore of my images on my Instagrams:

@heartfluttersbirdphotography
@pebblesink
@birdinginaustralia