Darwin, the NT, and my new love... Birds! - Pebbles + Pomegranate Seeds

Hello! I’m back!

Well, it has been a long time between drinks, I mean, blogs…

My last blog was back in 2019… and A LOT has happened since then!

There were a few factors that influenced my blogging tardiness… social media, COVID19, gardening, and just general loss of interest, but the main factor was that I have spent most of the last few years focused on writing my novel, so there was little time for anything else. (It’s finished btw… more about that later).

Then something quite special happened… out of the blue, we decided to move to Darwin (Northern Territory), and EVERYTHING changed.

I remember when we first moved here (I am writing from Darwin now), I wrote my “Itch List” – my form of ‘bucket list’ – a list of things I was ‘itching’ to do. It was filled with things in the foodie and being a good little wifey realm.

I am proud to say that one and a half years in, I haven’t done a single one of them.

So, not only have I been tardy in the blogging realm, but I have excelled at being tardy in the foodie realm, too! (My hubby tells me I am still a good little wifey, even if the food has taken a bit of a back seat).

To be honest, I think it was a bit of foodie burnout – after being involved in the food space for over 20 years, it was time to find something new.

Having said that, the ‘new’ took me totally by surprise…

Backtracking a few years… my best friend gave me her 300mm lens when she upgraded her camera equipment. It was a lens that I had envied when she bought it just before a Tasmanian road trip we did – she took some amazing pics, resulting in severe lens envy on my part.

“I just want to see what you can do with it,” she had said when she gave it to me. And for a good many years, I had done exactly nothing. Nada. Not a single photo. I don’t think I even got it out of the box – even though I was wildly excited when I received it.

Somewhere along the line, I had lost my passion for photography, and at the point when we moved to Darwin, I had fallen majorly out of love with photography in general, especially in the foodie space. And then it happened…

I took my first bird photo.

I still remember it. It was at Fogg Dam. My lovely daughter-in-law took me there to show me the birds. The causeway through the middle had just opened and the birds lined the road catching the fish as they spilled across. It was wonderfully exciting!

I had taken the camera with the 300mm lens (and 1.4 extender), but at the time I wasn’t even sure if the photos would turn out, fumbling about with the settings, trying to work out what was what. There wasn’t any real process or thought about anything that I was doing.

It was when I got home that my whole world totally changed.

Downloading the photographs, I was blown away by the detail that I had captured. Every single minute detail was there on the screen before me. And it was STUNNING.

I couldn’t believe that I had never noticed before how beautiful birds actually were. I remember crying as I comprehended how extraordinary nature was (is).

It probably sounds a bit melodramatic, but at that moment, there was this shift in me that I cannot explain, other than saying that for the first time in a long time, I felt alive. Really alive.

It has marked a change in direction – both in this blog, as well as everything in my life.

Yes. I have become a birder.

What does that mean? I don’t know – it changes every day.

But what I do know…

The foodie has left the building.

I could go on for hours about the direction this blog will take, my plans, the things I will write about, the places I will see, the bird species I will tick off… but I don’t have time. There are birds out there I need to discover, photograph, determine every nuance of…

There is nature that I need to live and breathe. Places I need to see.

But I am a sharer, so buckle up.

Every day is a journey, a new discovery – there is much to share!

But in a nutshell. I am back!

And I hope you will join me on this journey.

In the meantime, my Instagram is where it is all happening…

@pebblesink
@heartfluttersbirdphotography

And where I will be when I am not here.

This story was written by Petra Hughes – Pebbles + Pomegranate Seeds