Abby McBride, Fulbright-National Geographic Storytelling Fellow and self-described sketch biologist, shares a day in the life of shorebird researchers working in the Netherlands’ Friesian meadows — a working landscape under threat from a burgeoning agricultural industry. Scroll through her notebook below, and visit www.abbymcbride.com to see more of her work. 

(A version of this story was originally published as a series of tweets here.)

Abby McBride is an itinerant sketch biologist and Fulbright-National Geographic Storytelling Fellow, exploring nature and science through art and stories. Armed with a biology degree from Williams College, Abby took the obvious career path and did some farming in Spain, became a nature illustrator in New York City, manned the helm of a lobster boat in downeast Maine, bird-blogged across the western United States, studied siblicidal boobies on an uninhabited Galápagos island, and worked as an ecology-researcher-piano-teacher-pastry-chef in western Massachusetts (in roughly that order). Next she went to MIT for a science writing degree, wrote for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, did communications for Bowdoin College and the American Ornithological Society, and went bicycling across Eurasia. Just back from a year in New Zealand, she’s currently sketchbiologizing on the coast of Maine.