nature – The Nature Bloggist

Neotropical cormorants on the coast of Paracas National Park

This is our blog, which is mostly about a pair of naturalists wandering around in various habitats hyperfocusing on them.

We’ll touch on travel, photography, nature, new species we find, cool habitats, cultures of the areas we visit, seeing what indigenous culture and traditions carry on, and also many bird facts sharing trip reports/travel stories about our ecotourism trips, tips, and whatever other excuses we can find to post bird photos and talk about the ecosystems we visit. Even if it’s fun for no one else, it’s me getting to ramble about things I like to ramble about.

We have a flickr photostream here we post highlights to with cool photos. If you are a fan of cool photos you should check it out.

We’re a big fan of citizen science and working at becoming a better citizen scientist. We should be better about posting to iNaturalist, but our iNaturalist account is here.

The general but flexible idea behind this blog is to focus on travel, nature and wildlife photography, amateur naturalism/citizen science, biology, birding, and related things. Over time we’ve worked out ways to travel cheap (enough) and keep things affordable (enough) on the ground to visit amazing natural spaces around the globe. We take a lot of nature photos, and will be posting many photos of cool birds and wildlife we find out in nature. We’re based in Austin and have traveled around the US & the world visiting the many ecosystems that make up our world.

Our cast:

Steven: nerd, bird obsessive, researcher, photographer, porter, driver, speaks some Spanish, primary blog author

Haley: nerd, researcher, master of finding cheap flights and working out bookings, photographer, navigator, speaks very little Spanish, blog editor and contributor

We work together as a team pretty well. Driving in a foreign country is much easier with a navigator. Steven’s knowledge of Spanish opens up a lot of opportunities, Haley’s abilities in planning the details of a trip for travel and lodging while keeping things cheap/affordable are amazing.

One of the keys to affordable ecotourism is using points and miles to work out deals on airfare, lodging, rental cars, and related things. One of the best is to grab mistake fares to destinations that sound interesting and then learn about them and take a trip there. We aren’t likely go into a ton of detail on these things but you can learn about them at the FlyerTalk Miles and Points forums. This also means we’re not doing tours or packages and are sparing in hiring guides.

We also both like going out and seeing birds and wildlife in their natural habitats. We love being in nature in general and especially look for places with a lot of wildlife. Getting to go hiking around exploring the worlds parks and protected habitats is great fun. Finding and learning about interesting plants, wildlife, and natural phenomena is a great hobby.

One of the highlights of our travel so far, for both of us, was (carefully and respectfully) seeing the Olive Ridley sea turtles coming ashore to lay their eggs. It was awesome In the original sense of that word.

Olive ridley sea turtles laying eggs in Nosara, Costa Rica

Over time we’ve traveled a fair amount visiting natural habitats and finding wildlife around the globe. We visited Oslo during spring migration, took a trip to Australia, visited Costa Rica, Norway, Greece, Canada, the UK, and elsewhere around the world checking out nature and wildlife. We love getting to see the variety of species of creatures on the Earth in person, and trying to understand the biogeography, natural history, and other things that shape the many different ecosystems around the world. On our blog we’ll be sharing our time visiting the amazing natural places on our planet.

We’re more naturalists than birders. Like a lot of folks, we like to seek out and admire the amazing things in nature and learn about nature. Birds are the ultra-successful inheritors of the legacy of dinosaurs. They’re managed to find a way to live and thrive on every continent in diverse habitats all over the Earth so they’re easy to find and fun to see and learn about, but other animals are always a wonder to see, and the plants and the ecosystem are all really interesting as well.

Red-eyed tree frog in CR

We’re a casual naturalist in the sense that we don’t keep carefully curated lists of each species we’ve seen. We’re not going out trying to find rare animals, the common ones are interesting and when uncommon and rare things show up they’re great, but our goal is to enjoy time spent in the wild looking around at wildlife. We don’t keep our bird life list counts up to date. We really do want to use eBird more to contribute to the project but we’re not there yet.

This also applies to photography. We like taking photos of birds and wildlife, and like seeing them as reminders of the different wonderful and sometimes amazing things we’ve seen, and it’s really cool having a way to share the things we find, but the photos aren’t the goal.

There’s a lot of amazing wildlife out there. The following is a probably far too-long collection of some of our favorite photos we’ve taken of wildlife in nature.