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
