Canon EOS R50. It’s sold with various lenses but just get the body and pair it with a Canon RF‑s 18‑150mm IS STM.

This will do 90% of everything you will ever need. Anything beyond that will be very specific and by the time you’ve discovered what that may be, if at all, you’ll know exactly what’s needed for that purpose.

This is the best choice for you, nothing else is as suited for your needs. Get it and you won’t have to waste time reading reviews, listening to tons of different opinions, endless advice from people who want to sell you something else.

You won’t have to worry if you should have got something better or cheaper or with other options.

No, get this and forget about all that. Because the alternative will ultimately mean less photography. And what you want is to spend as much time as possible taking photographs and planning when and where to take more photographs.

Buy this camera and this lens. Read the manual, shoot, learn your camera inside out, shoot more.

Buy a SanDisk Extreme SD card, not the other ones, not other brands, that one.

Shoot JPEGs. Learn how to change your camera settings to get different colours. You don’t need RAW files, no matter what anyone tells you. Canon are the experts at the colour your camera makes, get the camera to do that for you.

It’s said that to become proficient at photography you have to take about a hundred thousand photos. Your camera can do twice that easily. A few weeks before the warranty expires, send it to Canon for a full service. They will often replace things that are worn even though it works.

Even if in ten years you end up in a specialist field, you’ll still have this combo in your bag. It will still be what you use for holidays, for family, for fun.

Enjoy!

What’s going to be really important for wildlife is moreso the lens(es), rather than the camera body.

Generally speaking, what you want out of the camera body for wildlife is fast burst shooting for capturing that action moment and fast/accurate autofocus for keeping animals in focus while they’re moving.

A good and fairly priced camera body that will do this would be something inthe Sony a6000 series, the latest which is the a6700, but you could probably easily get away with an a6600 or even an a6400. (The less you spend on your camera body the more you can spend on lenses, and your lenses will cost significantly more than the camera body).

The a6700 is $1400, you could save a few hundred going used and/or getting one of the previous models.

But far more important than that is the focal length of the lens, and the maximum aperture of your lens.

The focal length is important in allowing you to get good photos of the wildlife that fill your frame/photo by optically getting you close to the animal.

The aperture is an opening in the lens that acts very much like the pupil in your eye. The maximum aperture is how large that opening can get, which is important because the bigger it gets, the more light it lets into the lens.

Letting more light into the lens is critically important because the more light you get, the faster your shutter speed can be, which will help you freeze the animals when in motion.

An good lens to start with would be the 70-200mm f2.8. (The maximum aperture of the lens is the f2.8. The smaller the aperture number the bigger the opening).

The Sony 70-200mm f2.8 costs between $200-3000 depending on the version you choose. That may seem eye watering, but consider that you’ll be able to use this lens literally for a lifetime (provided you take care of it).

For wildlife the 70-200 f2.8 is a good lens to start with but if you get serious about it over time you’ll likely want to get longer lenses to get you even closer (optically) to your subjects.

One thing to look into is whether a crop-frame camera will work for you (APS-C or whatever). The huge plus is that it, in effect, multiplies the focal length of your lens by the crop factor, so you can buy a shorter (and so, cheaper) lens for the same focal length. This is important because, as other posters have said, lens focal length is a key factor.

You do lose out on things like low light performance with a crop-frame camera, so it’s nothing like a pure win, but do look into it.

If wildlife is your prime subject, especially if it’s birds or shy animals, you can be reasonably sure you will always be working at the maximum focal length you have (even if its 600mm on a full frame camera), so you could look at a prime (fixed length) lens rather than a zoom one. Zoom becomes more important in landscape photos - “Fill the frame” is good advice. Photos of insects takes you into macro photography, and seperate lens from anything else you do.

Aperture - depends on what time of day you plan to take photos - if it’s daytime walks on even slightly sunny days, even F11 will do fine with a decent modern-ish camera (e.g. a Canon R6). Yes, F2.8 would be really nice, but gets really expensive on longer lenses! On the other hand, photos in woods on gloomy days using F11 might still be enough to ID a bird, but usually won’t satisfy due to noise.

As you might guess from the above, I’ve been very happy with a Canon R6 + RF 600mm F11 lens - but that met my price point.

Wildlife is going to be pretty lens heavy. You’ll want at least 400mm equivalent.

As r/photography likes to say, the equipment is really personal to you. For example, I absolutely hate using Canon cameras, something about their UI just puts me off; I’m a good deal slower when using them. If possible you should try out some cameras to see what sticks. If you’re serious I’d suggest renting something that catches your eye and is around your budget to try.

If you’re on a budget a DSLR is actually a great pick; you probably can get a higher level body used with some really cheap 80-400/100-400/150-600mm type lenses now. Saw on my local Amazon a Tamron 150-600mm G1 new being cleared for like under US1k.

Edit: Also, stating your budget will really get you more targeted recommendations.