Hooked On Nature

I've been hooked on nature since long before I had a hook for a hand. I was born without my right hand, but that never once got in the way of turning over logs to see what was living underneath, chasing lizards through the backyard, or catching every bug I could get my hands on. Kids do have business touching nature: getting dirty, getting curious, getting close. I grew up with pet chickens, planted cuttings torn straight from my mum's garden, and never really stopped being that kid who needed to know what was under the next rock. These days that same instinct shows up in how I feed my family: hunting and utilising feral animals for food, and returning what can't be eaten back into the garden to nourish what grows there. When I later got my prosthetic hook, I didn't want it to change me, it just gave the business its name. I was already decades into being exactly what I am now.

That's the thing I want people to understand: we didn't come from nature, and we don't visit it on weekends. We never left it. Somewhere along the way, most of us started treating nature like a place: a park, a bush track, a nice view, something separate that we occasionally connect to. Hooked On Nature exists to undo that. You're not in nature. You are nature.

I'm Tom, ecologist, educator, and someone who tries to live this rather than just teach it. I forage what grows wild, hunt and utilise feral animals to feed my family, and get my hands dirty in the ecosystems most people only look at from a distance. Not as a hobby. As proof that we're still part of the system, whether we act like it or not.

Through hands on safaris, night walks, and hidden in plain sight discoveries, like the quietly extraordinary Cumberland Plain Woodland, easy to overlook if you're only trained to notice roses and daffodils, I take people down the same path I've walked since I was old enough to lift a log. Learning to see the wild world not as scenery, but as something we're made of.

Once you really understand that, you take care of it differently. You take care of yourself differently.

So don't just visit nature. Come find out you already are it.