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HOW Sunbird Hill EVOLVED
by Julia Lloyd, Founder
"One of my missions is to nurture a deep, steady love of nature — the kind that doesn’t fade when the first thrill wears off. Lessons about attention, patience, and what happens when you keep showing up, season after season, to the same patch of forest edge and really listen.
I’ve always been irresistibly curious about the tiny things many people walk straight past: a delicate track pressed into damp earth, a leaf neatly nibbled, a discarded exoskeleton, an odd little clump on a twig…
After living and working inside Kibale Forest — on a tight schedule and on a mission to habituate chimpanzees under a Jane Goodall Institute programme — I found myself craving something slower. I wanted time to absorb the forest, to really feel it, not just move through it with a set purpose and a clipboard. I shifted to the forest edge and created a home where the land naturally morphed from farmland into a nature monitoring and rewilding site. Sunbird Hill was first created for me: so I could wander, marvel at everything, and enjoy the detective work of figuring it out — with field guides, local knowledge, and a growing web of expert friends who love a good mystery as much as I do.
Along the way, Sunbird Hill drew in a small team of Ugandan naturalists with that same bright-eyed curiosity. Together, we’ve shaped it, and together we’ve learned that in a world hungry for quick highlights and easy answers, the real magic is quieter: the early mornings, the muddy boots, the long walks, the careful notes, the mentoring of young naturalists, and the invisible repetition that lets a place recover and makes space for life to reappear.
They’re the kind of people who get genuinely excited by a new insect, a fresh feeding sign, an unfamiliar call from the thicket — and who never stop learning.
Rewilding isn’t a dramatic before-and-after — it’s a thousand tiny decisions made with care. And over time, those choices add up to the moments we live for: when a new species appears, when a child’s eyes widen at a bird call they can finally name — and when familiarity deepens into something rarer, like recognising a regular at the pond, or watching a bushbuck mother return with her daughter, quietly enjoying the safe haven.
We’ve been sharing Sunbird Hill for years with friends, students, neighbours, and fellow naturalists — like-minded people who want more than a checklist — as a living classroom and a recovering landscape shaped by careful monitoring, local knowledge, and the steady curiosity of our team. The rhythm is always the same: keen observation, thoughtful questions, field guides spread out on a table — and people tend to leave not just with sightings, but with stories, a real sense of nature-connectedness, and the feeling that they didn’t simply visit; they joined in."
Watch this short clip with Julia Lloyd “A Primatologist Empowers Local Communities in Uganda”
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