Abby McBride is a sketch biologist and Fulbright-National Geographic Storytelling Fellow specializing in field sketching.

After studying biology at Williams College, Abby took the obvious next steps and worked on three farms in Spain, drew nature illustrations in New York City, manned the helm of a Maine lobster boat, bird-blogged across the western United States, researched siblicidal boobies on an uninhabited Galapagos island, coached swimming, taught piano lessons, helped revise an invasion ecology textbook, and worked as a pastry chef, in roughly that order.

Next she went to MIT for a graduate degree in science writing, wrote stories for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Bowdoin College, developed a communications program for the American Ornithological Society, sketched icebergs in Iceland, babblers in Borneo, and giraffes in Kenya, and somehow ended up traveling from Pisa to Budapest on a three-speed bicycle with a basket in front.

She spent the better part of a year living out of an old station wagon in New Zealand to sketch and write stories about the world’s fastest-declining group of birds, seabirds, for the National Geographic Society newsroom. Subsequent projects have included drawing book illustrations, skating on Swedish ponds, and teaching sketching to geology and archaeology students. Abby is based in downeast Maine.

Photographs by Otto Whitehead (top) and Edin Whitehead (sidebar)