About

Hello and welcome! This is a blog about Australian nature, with an emphasis on birds. My name is Carol Probets. I’m so lucky that my home is the beautiful, World Heritage listed Blue Mountains, 100 kilometres west of Sydney. Birdwatching is how I earn a living. This includes guiding birding groups, carrying out bird surveys, and teaching adults and children about our feathered friends in the wild.

For 15 years I ran my own bird tour guiding business based in the Blue Mountains/Capertee Valley region. Now I’m taking time off from the business to work on some other projects.

Carol Probets (photo by Mike Williams) CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

As hinted at in the name of this blog, I have a special interest in lyrebirds, spending many a blissful winter’s day in the forest studying their behaviour and songs. I’m also fascinated by the spectacle of the honeyeater migration. Each autumn, with Blue Mountains Bird Observers, I co-ordinate a citizen science project to monitor their numbers as they fly through our area.

But it’s not just birds. For a true understanding of birdlife you also need to be a botanist, entomologist, ecologist and all-round naturalist. To think like a scientist and wonder like a child. There’s still so little known about our biodiversity, and so much to discover in any backyard or on any bushwalk. In this blog my aim is to write about nature in its diversity. The landscape, plants, birds, invertebrates, mammals, reptiles, fungi….the way they all interact and the seasonal and long-term changes. And the way they interact with us humans.

I believe that time spent in nature is never wasted — in fact there’s growing evidence that it’s vital for our wellbeing. The more we pay attention to nature, the more fascinating it becomes. It brings us into the present moment; it creates a sense of wonder and we begin to realise how much more there is to learn. Of course, we are not separate from nature but part of it, so we might learn something about ourselves in the process.

Like the nature I write about, this blog will probably evolve over time. I hope you enjoy coming along on the journey with me.

Thanks for reading!

Carol

P.S. You can read my full bio here. I’m also on Twitter at @carolprobets