Habitats of Australia: seeing the landscape through a birder’s eyes
- Hidetoshi (Mikey) Kudo
- 10 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Hidetoshi (Mikey) Kudo | Cairns Area Coordinator
What makes one patch of woodland fundamentally different from another – and how can understanding those differences help us find and understand birds?
On 31 August, BirdLife Northern Queensland welcomed author, habitat ecologist, and professional nature guide Iain Campbell to Stratford Library for the second talk night of the 2026 Cairns Birding Festival. His presentation, Habitats of Australia, explored a way of looking at landscapes that will be familiar to many experienced birders: understanding habitat not simply by the plants growing there, but through the relationships between vegetation structure, climate, soils, geography, and the animals that occupy it.
The presentation drew on Iain’s newly published book, Habitats of Australia, New Guinea, and the Solomons: A Field Guide for Birders, Naturalists, and Ecologists, co-authored with Charley Hesse and Phil Gregory. Published by Princeton University Press in March 2026, the guide describes 85 major habitats across the region and brings together habitat mapping, climate information, vegetation, soils, and wildlife assemblages in an accessible field-guide format.
Rather than treating vegetation as the sole defining feature of a habitat, the approach recognises that the birds and other animals associated with a landscape can be just as informative. For birders, this provides a particularly intuitive way to read country: the structure and environmental setting of a landscape can offer clues about the suite of species likely to occur there before a bird is even seen.
Iain brings an unusual combination of experience to the subject. After studying in Sydney and Canberra, he worked as a research regolith geochemist with CSIRO before travelling through Africa and South America mapping tropical landscapes and exploring for gold. His lifelong interest in birds eventually led to a career change, including establishing Tandayapa Bird Lodge in Ecuador and co-founding Tropical Birding Tours.
Since returning to Australia in 2021, Iain has continued working as a professional nature guide and habitat ecologist and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales. He has authored and co-authored a number of wildlife and habitat guides, including Birds of Australia: A Photographic Guide and Habitats of Europe.
His Cairns presentation takes us through some of Australia’s extraordinary ecological diversity and demonstrates how looking beyond individual species can give birders a richer understanding of the landscapes in which they occur.
Watch the recording of Iain Campbell’s Habitats of Australia presentation below.
