Free like a bird

​Wanderlust​

When I think of the ultimate traveller, birds come to mind. Watching one disappear into the horizon, wondering where it came from, and where it is heading next. Some birds spend most of their lives in flight, constantly travelling around the world guided by instinct, weather and light. Others return to the exact same patch of earth every season. Filling the sky with motion and bringing song to our lives, no landscape picture quite captures their omnipresence. Yet, they’re there, offering a fleeting hello and goodbye, often before you know to look up.

Constant bird movement is also in the background on Bruny Island, lunawanna-alonnah the traditional land of the Nuenonne people. Set in Tasmania, one of the southern hemisphere’s most remarkable wildlife destinations, this is home to rare endemic species, ancient plant life and ecosystems that seem almost untouched by time. More than 40% of this island south of Australia is protected in national parks and reserves, and a huge part forms the UNESCO-listed Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area. The island's remote northwestern edge, Kennaook/Cape Grim, is famous for recording the purest baseline atmospheric air on the planet. Here, amidst natural wonder and clear skies, birdwatching is all about learning how to pay attention.

It was here that Dr. Tonia Cochran, Biologist (Bachelor of Science in Botany and Zoology, with Honors and PhD degrees in Zoology), coincidentally noticed a small colony of endangered Forty-spotted Pardalotes. Among Australia’s rarest bird species, she bought a patch of land and began protecting their habitat. Birds were not her only fascination. From an early age, she had been passionate about finding and taking care of unusual species, and kept a little menagerie of snakes, lizards, fossils, shells and several orphaned or injured animals in her childhood bedroom. She founded Inala Nature in 1988, which has since grown into one of Australia’s most respected wildlife and conservation experiences, spanning endemic art reserves, wildlife rehabilitation and ecological tourism. Inala acknowledges the Palawa people as the traditional custodians of lutruwita. Today, the Inala Conservation Reserve tours operate across 1,500 acres of forest and wetlands. Tonia’s passionate work has been shown to the public in several television documentaries and series, she regularly gives lectures on topics ranging from Ornithology to marine biology in Antarctica and still today actively continues her touring and conservation work.

I spoke to Cat Davidson, one of Inala’s specialist ecology guides who among many awards also recently won Australia’s Top Tour Guide for 2025. Before landing on this island, her work carried her from the Arctic Circle and polar bear territory to the rainforests of Queensland and the windswept Falkland Islands, experiences that shaped her values, and her connection with birds and wildlife.

“I started with Polar Bears, but it was the Rockhopper Penguins that sealed my fate. Travelling, working my way across the world, visa to visa, country to country, my winding route eventually led to the edge of the Arctic Circle. There, I took guests out in kayaks into Hudson Bay, dodging icebergs, Russian tankers, Beluga Whales, and large white carnivores. Amid the splendour of the tundra, what began as adventure-sports instruction evolved into a deeper guiding practice rooted in ecology.

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From the frozen north to Queensland’s subtropical rainforests, and then to the raw heathlands of the sub-Antarctic Falkland Islands, my passion for interpreting nature has solidified into a career that I love fiercely, and which has led me to create my home and community on the most extraordinary island at the bottom of Australia. I love that as a birding guide I get to help people get their boots muddy, their hair windblown and their hearts full.”

Curiosity matters more than expertise. You do not need to be able to recognise every chirp and call to enjoy ornithology. Birdwatching has as much to do with stillness as it does with movement. The same air you just walked straight through is suddenly filled with flutter, sounds and small interactions that were happening all along, without you noticing. One particularly popular walking tour at Inala, leads to a raptor photography hide where visitors can sit invisible, to then witness the jaw-dropping action of birds of prey. Patiently waiting behind glass, visitors can watch large birds up-close, their slow circling and jagged descent. A dramatic spectacle where you briefly disappear into their hunting game.

Travellers who come to stay in one of the Inala cottages can also get a glimpse of the infectious excitement that is Cat. She shared some of the most extraordinary and unforgettable moments she has experienced with birdlife.

“I love standing in the liminal half-light of dusk, watching hundreds of Short-tailed Shearwaters pour back to their burrows from the sea. The night air is still and sweet. It's bewitching. Into that quiet, I speak of their cultural name Yola to the Palawa people, their role as a seasonal food source, their migratory rhythms as markers of connection to country, sky, ancestors, and the great cycles of life.”

I asked Cat what she notices in visitors' reactions. “At its heart, birding is a practice of attention. It asks you to slow down, to tune your senses, and to become genuinely present in a place. But what excites me most is what happens after that first moment of seeing, when curiosity kicks in and the world starts to reveal its connections.”, she reflected.

“In the recalibrating of their relationship with the natural world, people often find they want to do more than just look at birds. Love and respect take root and from that grows something the conservation movement needs most right now: people who feel personally implicated in the fate of wild things and who want to take action to protect, conserve and restore.”

“While participating in the important conservation and ecology work of Inala, how do you stay emotionally stable when witnessing the circle of life, which can be beautiful but also harsh and sometimes unfair?”, I asked. “In a world of escalating environmental anxiety, people are hungry, not just for facts, but for feeling. They want to understand what is happening to the natural world, but they also desperately want to find hope in it. Birding offers both.” She described how the natural world can continuously inspire us to not flee our feelings but remain open to wonder and amazement in life.

“We can read all the articles about birding's benefits for physical, mental, and spiritual health. But that means very little compared to the actual joy of the experience. The world feels kinder, and our own challenges more manageable, when you are standing in the presence of something like a Pink Robin, a tiny explosion of joy and magic that somehow exists in the real world, against all odds.” Rather than speaking about emotional protection or regulation, she touched on the meaning of finding awe in our small, short presence on this remarkable earth. The very definition of Wanderlust tagged newsletters here within Wellness Tourism.

Wildlife and birdwatching with Inala is also possible internationally, as their tour guides travel to all continents of the world. Destinations are selected for their birding significance, with a conservation ethos that travels with the guide regardless of geography. Some of the upcoming tours will take visitors to Mongolia, Kenya, Chile, Papua New Guinea, Costa Rica, China and Nepal. Tour proceedings and donations also continue to fund the future of Inala’s conservation work.

One of those projects is the shaping of Jurassic Garden, a remarkable botanical collection inspired by Gondwana, the ancient supercontinent that began breaking apart roughly 180 million years ago. Prehistoric plant lineages once shared between Australia, Antarctica, South America and Africa stem from then. Today, Tasmania shelters more Gondwanan species than almost anywhere else on earth, and the garden follows that lineage through walkable paths.

The Jurassic Garden draws human existence into an experience unlike anything else. Guided one-hour tours take visitors through a botanical past, tracing how extinct giant birds and dinosaurs shaped plant evolution, and how the plants still growing on this island carry the memory of a world that no longer exists. Spread across five acres, the garden is a step into our evolutionary story and the ancient ecosystems that shaped us, an open-air museum for today.

With so much history and wisdom all around, I was curious to hear about what some of the lessons she thought birds can teach us. “Birds teach us that nothing exists in isolation. Every species is embedded in geology, ecology, culture, and time. Once you see that, once you feel it, you can't unsee it. The world becomes textured in a way it simply wasn't before.”

She continued, “A Baba Dioum quote I return to often: ‘In the end we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.’ Birding, at its best, is that teaching. And love, it turns out, begins with learning how to look.”

Birds stay alert and in motion, trusting an instinct that tells them exactly where they need to go. There is a great deal of freedom in that. They fly through landscapes, staying for a season or a single afternoon. We are really no different: visiting guests, no matter how intense the schedule at home feels or how packed the itinerary for time away is. Life is made of fleeting moments worth slowing down for. To listen, look and notice what we are living through, then finding our own way.

With her wide-ranging inspiration of the animal kingdom, I had to ask: “If you could borrow one ability from birds, what would it be?”

“I would love to porpoise like a Penguin.” It’s that aerodynamic, wave-like bouncing from sea to air which aquatic animals do when they leap out of the water in a continuous motion to breathe while swimming at high speeds.

Cat reminisced, “Some of my most treasured memories are from watching penguins in the Falkland Islands. As I would sit watching the ocean, a wave full of porpoising Rockhopper Penguins would come surging in and land all around me. Below me, beside me, even above me, they launched themselves from the water and began climbing the steep cliff face to their colony.

Their strength, agility and elegance took my breath away. I was close enough to see individual drops of saltwater trembling on their bright yellow crests. I watched them preen their shining feathers back into waterproof perfection, and I watched them throw their heads back and call their bold, joyful celebrations of life to the sky.”