Hi, I’m Leigh. I live in the Northern Illawarra in coastal NSW, Australia. It’s a beautiful area bounded by an escarpment to the west and yellow sandy beaches to the east. It is only an hours drive south from the major city of Sydney but is also the gateway to the picturesque NSW south coast .
I have a science degree but am not an entomologist or zoologist. I currently work as an accounts clerk part-time but was a medical scientist in another life. I didn’t become the next Jane Goodall, Gerald Durrell or Jacques Cousteau – which I’d kinda hoped for. I don’t own a wildlife park or travel to exotic destinations. But I’ve found in the last few years there are amazing, undiscovered (or, less romantically, you could say, ‘poorly- described’) creatures in my own backyard. There is no greater relaxation for me than following an unknown wasp around the garden with my camera. I don’t even have to get properly dressed or find the keys to the car.
In this switched-on, frenetically-paced, often narcissistic existence, I maintain the quiet observation of nature is a under-valued therapy.
I have always been attentive to the bird life everywhere I go. They form a large part of my sense of belonging to places. The call of a currawong, the laughing of a kookaburra, the ringing of a bellbird can transport me to memories of childhood, holidays or towns where I’ve lived.
In short, I make the most of every opportunity to wonder at the natural world. When I scuba dived in my twenties I learnt everything I could about marine life. I took on a role of teaching basic marine biology to trainee divers. Today I still love looking into rock pools and studying the life washed up on the shore.
I have gradually upgraded my camera equipment over the last ten years and now own a Canon 6D camera, a macro 100mm Canon lens for bugs and a Tamron 100-400mm lens for bird photography
I also write fiction in my spare time. If you want to learn more about my writerly journey then I have another website leighroswen.com. The nature-lover’s log used to form part of that website but migrated to this new site as it was getting too unwieldy. However I still aim to make my posts in Bird Tales and The Log Blog exercises in nature writing rather than dry factual accounts.
Nature lover's log 