About Hooked On Nature

Long before I had a hook for a hand, I was hooked on nature. I was born without my right hand, but it never once stopped me turning over logs to see what was living underneath, chasing lizards through the backyard, or catching every bug I could get my hands on. When I later got my prosthetic hook, it didn't start anything new, it just gave the business its name.

I was the kid who turned up to school with jars of huntsman spiders, wood cockroaches, snails, ants, centipedes and frogs, much to my teachers' horror, not to mention the blue-tongue lizard that regularly turned up loose in my backpack. My mum was always too scared to go through my bag.

As I got older, my fascination moved toward the creatures most people find harder to love: red-bellied black snakes, diamond pythons, and for a good while I had a posse of young, free-flying, hand-raised magpies calling my parents' back veranda home. It was never just the animals, either. I've always loved plants too. My family still tells stories of me as a kid taking cuttings and popping them in pots, willing them to grow. These days I'm an avid gardener, still trying to build the perfect home for wildlife, or as I'd put it now, habitat. I grew up with pet chickens too, and to this day, hunting and utilising feral animals is how I put food on the table for my own family, returning what can't be eaten back into the garden to nourish what grows there.

I don't think I've ever really grown up. I'm still climbing trees, rolling over old logs, and heading into the bush looking for what's actually there. I followed that same obsession into my career and now work as an ecologist, and eventually into Hooked On Nature, because I wanted to share it with as many people as I could.

The mission is simple: get people back into nature, hooked on unlocking the stories in the wildlife, plants and fungi around them. Because kids do have business touching nature, getting dirty, getting curious, getting close, and grown-ups never stopped needing that either. The more time people spend with the nature already in their garden, their roadside reserve, or their local national park, the better they'll understand it, and the more naturally they'll want to look after it.

If you're ready to meet all the characters living right under your nose, come join me on a wander in one of the many locations around Sydney (see my tours page), or get in touch to arrange a private one.