At twenty-four, Hendrikje Kooij has done something quietly remarkable: she has made birdwatching feel not just accessible, but essential. With her Canon R7 and a Laowa 90mm macro lens, she documents a world most people walk past without seeing.

Her work has been featured in De Morgen and on BNNVARA's Vroege Vogels, where her portraits of water birds - her beloved crested grebes ("futen") especially - have drawn audiences who would never have called themselves bird people. She tracks them through the seasons: the courtship dance with its head-shaking ritual, the chicks riding on a parent's back, the way a grebe vanishes beneath the surface and reappears fifty meters away with barely a ripple.

What sets her work apart is the intimacy. She does not shoot from hides at a distance; she learns the birds' patterns, returns to the same spots for weeks, lets them grow accustomed to her presence. The result is a body of work that feels less like wildlife documentation and more like a shared confidence - a kingfisher mid-dive, the iridescent blue a blur; a great crested grebe shaking water from its ruffled neck feathers in the golden light of early morning.

It was the grebes that started it all. A pair of crested grebes on a pond in Amsterdam turned a hobby into an obsession. She had just moved to the city, homesick for the Friesland countryside where she grew up, and found herself drawn to the same park bench day after day. The grebes nested within sight of the cycling path; commuters streamed past on their phones while the birds performed their ancient, elaborate courtship entirely unnoticed. Hendrikje started photographing them to share what everyone was missing. That first image - two grebes mirroring each other, necks curved into a heart - went modestly viral, and she has not stopped since.