Mia Grundy

And it would take my mind away from anything.

Losing my dad or being stressed about trying to find work at the time, whatever it might have been.

I'm just juggling life things and I'd stop thinking about that and focus in really on nature.

And so all of that weight that I was carrying lifted for a little bit.

And yeah, when I got home...

I'd feel like I'd succeeded at something in a day, even if I did nothing for the rest of the day, you know.

I'd be like, well, I went outside, I saw a bird.

Or sometimes I'd take my camera and take a photo of a bird and that would be an even bigger thing.

So, yeah.

Well, I've always been taking photos of them, but I think when I shifted from, yeah, just logging them on my phone and trying to, you know, speed run, find as many species as I could on a checklist and maybe just focusing on like one bird or one species for the day encouraged me to slow down, you know, pay attention to their behavior.

So I wasn't just looking at the colors of the bird.

I was like identifying them and paying attention to their behavior.

how they're feeding, where they're sitting in the canopy or maybe on the ground, if they're interacting with other species of birds or their own species and just responding to the environment around them.

And yeah, when you're capturing a photo, you slowly learn how to anticipate these moments.

You're watching behaviours and then you kind of learn to...

Yeah, understand how each bird flies and moves naturally and they move differently at different times of the day.

And yeah, it requires a lot of patience and obviously with photography as well, birds don't take directions.

So it's very rude.

And yeah, I guess, you know, sometimes I might think I want to capture, you know, the under parts of the wings of a bird today.

And if I'm lucky, I'll capture a beautiful phone and be like, yes, I did it.