My love of birds and the natural world began when I was ten years old.

I was recovering from a hip operation and spending a lot of time outside in the garden when an iridescent black bird with striking purple eyes flew down almost to my level and began eating berries from a small bush. I remember staring at it, completely fascinated. Until that moment, I had no idea colours like that were even possible on a bird.

It would be many years before I owned my first field guide, but when I finally did, it opened up a whole new way of seeing the world around me. Observation became a habit, and eventually that curiosity led me to my first camera.

The more time I spent watching birds, the more I realised that you are never really watching just the bird.

A bird leads you to the tree it feeds in, the flowers and insects it depends on, the waterholes it visits and the places it chooses to roost. You begin to notice what is growing underfoot, what is moving between the leaves, what appears after rain and how everything quietly connects to everything else.

Sometimes I’ll head out hoping to find one particular bird and come home with photographs of a butterfly, a mushroom, a lizard, an unexpected patch of light or some other small thing I hadn’t gone looking for at all. That has become part of the joy of it — the landscape rarely gives you exactly what you expected, but it almost always gives you something worth noticing.

This Strange Land grew from that way of looking — slowing down, paying attention, and discovering how much is happening around us when we take the time to notice.