Meet the Artist Trying to Save Seabirds—By Sketching Them

Video by Otto Whitehead

Last Christmas, while her friends and family in Maine were wrapping presents and stuffing stockings, sketch biologist Abby McBride was alone on a river bank in Lumsden, New Zealand, drawing a flock of black-billed gulls—the world’s most threatened species of gull.

With a Fulbright storytelling fellowship from the National Geographic Society, McBride had set out on an yearlong adventure that would take her around New Zealand and back again. Armed with nothing but a car, an inflatable kayak, and her sketchbook, McBride traveled to the archipelago's most remote regions to observe and illustrate rare seabirds.

In doing so, McBride sees herself as something of a “21st century Victorian naturalist.” Following in the footsteps of famous scientists like Charles

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