I recently joined Hannah on the Women Birders Happy Hour podcast, a show built around exactly what it sounds like: good conversation with women who love birds. We covered a lot of ground: my own path into birding, the community I built here in Colorado, and how Her Wild Life actually started. A few parts of that conversation connect directly enough to the trips we run that I wanted to write them down here too.
A Deck in Costa Rica, and the Moment This Actually Started
The real start of Her Wild Life happened on a trip, not in a planning meeting. I was on a cruise in Costa Rica, checking out an itinerary, and our lead guide for the whole trip was a woman, Linda. I had been traveling to Costa Rica for over twenty years by that point, and I could count my female guides on less than one hand. On a river excursion during that same trip, a guide made a joke about a town called Silencio, saying it was named that because they kept women quiet there. Half the group laughed. I did not.
A few days later, sitting on a deck at one of my favorite lodges in the country, thinking about the trip we had just had with Arlette, our own Arlet Quirós Calvo, it clicked. Women’s travel already existed as a category. What did not exist was a company built that way from the ground up: founders, guides, local partners, all of it. So I just started. That decision is the whole reason our Costa Rica expedition looks the way it does today.
It Is Not About the Checklist
One of the things Hannah and I talked about is how to actually welcome someone new to birding, and my answer has not changed in years. It is not about the species name. It is about noticing something for the first time, or watching a bird you have seen a hundred times do something you have never seen it do. I would rather someone say they are not sure what they saw than pretend confidence they do not have. That same instinct shapes how our guides run a group in the field. Nobody is being tested. Nobody has to already know what they are looking at. The whole point is paying attention together, not finishing a list.
The Emperor Geese I Did Not Expect
Our first Her Wild Life departure had just wrapped when we recorded this, and it was our Kodiak trip. I had not spent much time studying emperor geese before that week, and I ended up down a research hole on the species after seeing a Kodiak birding group mention they had just arrived. Watching that pulse of geese build over the week, knowing hunting for that species had actually been paused this year because their numbers are down, was one of the more quietly remarkable things I have watched happen in the field. Every single person on that trip saw the species for the first time in their life. That is the kind of week our Kodiak expedition is built to deliver.
Listen to the full conversation on Women Birders Happy Hour to hear the rest, including my actual birding origin story. To learn more about Her Wild Life, visit our About Us page.
