FOR Greg Taylor, the path to winning this year’s Hungerford Award is a shaggy bird story that can be traced all the way back to hard times in San Francisco.

Despite being a highly qualified ecologist with real-world experience, Taylor was struggling to find work and felt guilty about “taking up space” in his best friend’s apartment.

“San Francisco is merciless in that regard, it’s so hard to make it,” he says.

Out of the blue, he spotted an ad for a PhD in Australia, studying fairy-wrens, and on a whim decided to apply.

He was successful, but after a stint in Melbourne he was tired of the cold weather, and Brisbane was too humid, so he jumped on a flight to Perth.

• Ecologist Greg Taylor won the 2026 Hungerford Award.

“It sounds crazy, but when I got off the plane here in Perth, before I had made it to my Airbnb, something happened, and I don’t know what, but I fell in love with this place,” he says.

Fast forward to last Friday when Taylor was announced as the winner of the prestigious Hungerford Award for his narrative non-fiction book Wildlife in the Open Eucalyptus Forests, nabbing a cool $15,000 and a publishing contract with Fremantle Press.

The concept of the book is simple, but ingenious—each chapter is a standalone story about a different species of wildlife.

The hairy and fluffy list of protagonists includes a timid bandicoot, numbats holding on at Dryandra, a critically endangered swift parrot, and a family of tawny frogmouths.

Each of the 24 stories is based on science, but through good old-fashioned storytelling and the use of metaphors, Dreamtime stories and even Norse mythology, Taylor engages the reader and immerses them in that creature’s world.

“In the book, it’s about getting the reader to understand what life is like for these species,” he says.

“If a person knows a species deep enough, at some point they may even have a love for it. From that love we can get to a point of not wanting to harm something, and actively going out of our way to protect it.”

Taylor says one of his favourite chapters was on the chuditch (western quoll), WA’s largest endemic mammalian carnivore.

“That story just wrote itself. It felt like being on a roller coaster—I was going along for the ride and I was so happy by the end. I didn’t even feel like I had written it,” he says.

He is most proud of the chapter on the wedge-tailed eagle, one of the first he wrote.

Initially it didn’t work, and he kept going back to it, until he had captured the essence of the majestic bird.

“Once I had the thing at its very core, it all fell into place.”

Wildlife in the Open Eucalyptus Forests should hit the bookshelves in November next year, and he says Fremantle Press is planning to have an illustration of the animal in each chapter.

“I think it will be helpful to the reader as some of them are quite obscure, like the agile antechinus,” he says.

Hmm, we wonder what Taylor would make of the famous Fremantle Herald Chook—a chicken with human legs. Maybe it will be in the deluxe hardback edition.

Taylor, who specialises in birds, has found ecology work highly rewarding but not very lucrative—he stalked fairy-wrens at the foot of the Great Dividing Range, captured black-legged kittiwakes atop an abandoned radio tower on an island off the coast of Alaska, and tagged giant kangaroo-rats in the largest grassland remnant of California’s San Joaquin Valley. 

After arriving in Perth, he had a nine-to-five job at the Cancer Council.

Based in Claremont, he’s close to finishing his second book, but doesn’t want to tell the Herald about it, because he’s a “very superstitious writer”, and is planning on starting a third soon.

The Hungerford Award is sponsored by Fremantle Press, City of Fremantle and Centre for Stories. For more information visit www.fremantlepress.com.au.

by STEPHEN POLLOCK