I recently sat down with the Soul of Travel podcast to talk about gender equity in wildlife guiding, what conservation travel actually requires to work, and why Her Wild Life exists in the first place. The full episode is worth listening to in its entirety, but three threads from that conversation connect most directly to the trips we run and the guides who lead them, so I wanted to write them down here too.
Where It Started, Sea Turtles in Costa Rica
My guiding career did not begin with a business plan. It began with a study abroad program focused on sea turtle conservation in Costa Rica, and an early lesson that has shaped everything we have built since, conservation and tourism fund each other or neither survives. That early project only continued because tourists kept coming. Take the travelers away, and the funding for the turtle protection disappears with them.
That is not an abstract idea for us. It is the same principle behind the conservation donation built into every trip we run, including our own Costa Rica expedition, back in the same country where all of this started.
“Do You Have Women Guides?”
The story behind Her Wild Life itself is simple. A female guide was what we wanted for a trip in Costa Rica, and the answer from operators was that none existed. That turned out to be untrue. One was already working in the country, already skilled, simply never asked for by operators who defaulted to the same names every time.
From there, the same question went out everywhere, at trade shows, in supplier meetings, on calls with lodges and outfitters across the industry. Some had an answer. Many did not. At one meeting in Peru, a conservation project leader realized mid-conversation that the most qualified guide available for his own operation, the person who actually knew the region best, was his mother. It had simply never occurred to him to ask.
The pattern across the industry is one we talk about a lot: in a field where women make up the majority of recreational birders and wildlife enthusiasts, guide teams remain overwhelmingly male. Waiting for that to change on its own was never going to work. We hire on enthusiasm and field experience rather than a polished resume alone, which is exactly how we found Carly Crow, now one of our own naturalist guides, brought on after a cold call that showed exactly the kind of initiative the usual hiring process tends to filter out.
The Luxury of Not Sharing the Experience
One story from the episode captures how we actually solve problems in the field. When Nebraska’s best-known sandhill crane viewing sites became crowded after the pandemic, we did not wait in line with everyone else. We moved west, to smaller communities along the same migration corridor, and found a spot where our group could watch ten thousand cranes at dusk without another tour in sight.
The luxury for our travelers has never been about comfort for its own sake; it is not having to share the experience with anybody else. That same instinct- to find where the wild moment still lives rather than compete for the version everyone already knows about- is how our Nebraska expedition is built today.
What This Means for Her Wild Life
None of this is new philosophy assembled for a podcast interview. It is the same reasoning behind why we exist as a women-led company in the first place, and why conservation, community, and guide expertise feel like connected problems to us, not separate marketing points. My closing thought on the episode was a genuine one: more trips where the guide up front is someone else, and it is still a woman leading the group.
Listen to the full conversation on the Soul of Travel podcast to hear the rest of the story. To learn more about Her Wild Life and the philosophy behind it, visit our About Us page.
