From two encounters with birds to Birds Experience

Long before our Big Year birding in Colombia, before Birds Colombia, Guardián de las Aves, or Birds Experience, there were two separate stories.

Both would eventually lead us to birding in Colombia, traveling across the country, photographing its birds, meeting the people connected to them, and ultimately creating Birds Experience.

But our stories with birds began separately, in two different places and at two very different moments in our lives.

And in both of them, birds appeared at exactly the right moment.

Niky, Ecuador, December 2014

For Niky, it happened in December 2014 in Guayaquil, Ecuador.
During a visit to Cerro Blanco, she joined a nature outing accompanied by one of the reserve’s local guides. Somewhere along the way, the guide helped her find an Ecuadorian Trogon.
It was one bird.
But sometimes one bird is enough.
Seeing that trogon and discovering that there was someone who could recognize it, find it, and open the door to an entire world she had barely noticed before fascinated her.
Something had begun.

Mauro, Manizales, September 2015

My encounter with birds came nine months later, and for very different reasons.
In September 2015, after going through a separation, I was looking for something to do, somewhere to go, perhaps simply a way to clear my mind.
I went for an outing at Parque Los Alcázares in Manizales.
And there, unexpectedly, I found birds.
What began as a way to occupy my time became something else.
I found my therapy.
Birding gave me a reason to go outside, walk, observe, listen, and concentrate on something beyond myself. One bird led to another, one outing to the next, and nature gradually became a place where I wanted to spend more and more of my time.
Neither Niky nor I knew the other existed.
But birds were already quietly preparing the introduction.

September 2016: Our Paths Cross

In September 2016, I saw Niky on Facebook.
She immediately caught my attention.
And then came the coincidences.
Advertising. Photography. Birds.
A publicist, photographer, and birder.
There seemed to be too many things in common not to say hello.
That is how our story began.
Soon we were no longer exploring nature separately. We began traveling together, looking for birds, taking photographs, and discovering new places.
Birds became part of our relationship from the very beginning.
They gave us reasons to wake up before sunrise, take unfamiliar roads, climb mountains, enter forests, and keep discovering Colombia together.
And somewhere along those roads, something else was taking shape.
We realized that we did not only enjoy finding birds.
We loved telling their stories.

2016: Birds Colombia Is Born

That same year, Birds Colombia was born.
We both came from the world of advertising and communications, so our natural reaction to everything we were discovering was exactly that: we wanted to share it.
Colombia had an extraordinary diversity of birds, but we felt there were still so many stories around them waiting to be told.
Birds Colombia became our way of doing that.
For years, we even took on the challenge of publishing one Colombian bird every day, accompanied by information that would help people discover and understand it a little better.
Because we were becoming convinced of something that would later become fundamental to the way we understand conservation:
It is very difficult to protect what we do not know.
But Birds Colombia also helped us discover that birds could do something far more powerful than fill a website with photographs.
They could connect people.

2018: A Story Called Kimi

Toward the end of 2018, we came across a story that made us ask ourselves a very simple question:
How can we have more Kimis?
Kimi represented something we were beginning to encounter in different parts of Colombia: children and young people capable of falling in love with birds when someone simply gave them the opportunity to discover them.
The question stayed with us.
And eventually, it became a project.

2019: A Year of New Beginnings

In March 2019, we got married.

By then, birds had already become inseparable from the life we were building together. They were part of our travels, our photography, our friendships, our work, and increasingly, our sense of purpose.
Later that year, another important part of our story began.
In November 2019, we launched the first edition of Guardián de las Aves.
The original idea was simple: find children and young people who were passionate about birds and give them tools that would allow them to continue discovering that world.
We selected ten winners from different parts of Colombia, and each received a birding kit with binoculars, a field guide, backpack, vest, cap, T-shirt, and binocular harness.
But we quickly realized that this could become much more than a competition.
Guardián began to grow into a community.
Birds could awaken curiosity, identity, and a sense of belonging and, perhaps most importantly, create a different relationship between a new generation and the places they call home.
Then 2020 arrived.
The world stopped.
And we began imagining an idea that seemed slightly crazy.
To travel across an entire country following its birds.

2021: Our Big Year Birding in Colombia

We decided to dedicate 365 days to traveling across Colombia.
All 32 departments.
A camera, binoculars, roads, flights, boats, long walks, countless early mornings, and one question that would stay with us throughout the year:
How many of Colombia’s birds could we find?
We called it The Big Year Colombia.
By the end of that year, we had recorded 1,473 bird species.
But strangely enough, when we think about our Big Year today, the number is no longer the most important part of the story.
Because behind those 1,473 species were hundreds of people.
Local guides, birders, researchers, reserve owners, communities, families, and people who had dedicated much of their lives to protecting a forest, a species, or simply the piece of Colombia they called home.
We traveled approximately 35,000 kilometers and discovered something no bird list could ever have shown us.
We discovered Colombia.
Not the Colombia of maps or tourism brochures.
The Colombia of back roads and mountains. Of kitchens and coffee after an early morning of birding. Of conversations with people who know a forest because they have spent their entire lives beside it.
We discovered different accents, landscapes, foods, climates, and ways of living. We began to understand that traveling for birds could also be an extraordinary way of understanding a country.
Birds were no longer simply what we were searching for.
They had become the thread connecting everything.

365 days. 32 departments. 1,473 bird species. One unforgettable journey across Colombia.

From Birding in Colombia to Birds Experience

After traveling across Colombia for an entire year, something had changed.
We had discovered extraordinary places, but more importantly, we had learned how we wanted to travel.
Without rushing after a list.
With time to observe.
Time to photograph.
Time to talk.
Traveling with local guides and communities. Staying in places that are part of the territory. Meeting the people behind the destinations and allowing birds to become the doorway to discovering something much bigger.
From that journey came what we initially called Birds Colombia Experience, which eventually evolved into simply Birds Experience.
It was not born from a business plan.
It grew from the kilometers we traveled, the birds we found, the people we met, and one certainty that our Big Year had made impossible to ignore:
We wanted to share with others the Colombia that birds had allowed us to discover.
Today, we personally design and guide our journeys.
We still photograph birds.
We still travel across Colombia.
We still tell its stories.
Birds Colombia continues to be our voice.
Guardián de las Aves continues to connect new generations with birds and nature.
And Birds Experience is our way of opening this story to people who want to come and experience it with us.
We are Niky & Mauro.
And although today we have a much clearer idea of where we are going, in many ways we are still doing exactly what we did when all of this began:
following birds to discover what lies beyond them.

Field Notes Begins Here

Every journey has a beginning.
This is ours.
And we could think of no better way to begin Field Notes than by telling the story of how we got here.
This will be a place to share what years of birding in Colombia have taught us.
The places we discover. The birds we photograph. The people we meet. The stories behind the destinations. The lessons we learn in the field. And some of those corners of Colombia that birds have taken us to along the way.
Sometimes it will be a story.
Sometimes a destination.
Sometimes a bird.
Sometimes simply something worth sharing from the field.
Because after all these years traveling through this country, one thing continues to surprise us:
birds always end up taking us somewhere.
Niky & Mauro
Birds Experience