About the Project

In 2023 I traveled the southern hemisphere as a Watson Fellow with the goal of learning about community-driven bird conservation. Prior to 2023, my understanding of global biodiversity had been mostly curated by documentaries, nonprofits and other birders. Notably absent: anyone who lives in the same valley as a Resplendent Quetzal or actually counts Wandering Albatross nests. My goal was to understand the lives of people who interact with the world’s most iconic bird species.

The Watson is a one-year travel fellowship designed to take college graduates and isolate them with a project built around one of their interests or passions. I got to plan my whole itinerary and was responsible for keeping track of my expenses along the way. The Foundation has just a couple of stipulations that guide the itinerary:

1. Stay outside of the U.S. (and any country I’d visited before) for a full year. This means I couldn’t return to Ecuador, Guatemala, or the UK.
2. Avoid traveling to countries designated risk level 3 or higher by the US State Department.

Here is the itinerary I ended up following:

In January and February I visited Costa Rica, where ecotourism is arguably better-developed than anywhere else in the world. For March and April I rode buses around Argentina, through the Pampas, Atlantic Rainforest, Yungas Cloud Forest and Patagonian Steppe.

In May I volunteered as an audio analyst with a birdsong recording project at the Mbaracayu Forest Reserve in Paraguay. For the first half of June I visited the dry, thorny Chaco of western Paraguay, then returned to northern Argentina for two weeks to visit some of the sites I hadn’t earlier, including the fantastic Ibera wetlands.

In July, I took two long flight which landed me in Indonesia, where I spent a month and a half in Sulawesi, Komodo and Bali. For visa reasons, I visited Cambodia for just a week (and got to see the temples at Angkor Wat) before returning to Indonesia. During my second time in the country I spent two weeks in West Papua in some of the world’s most interesting ecotourism situations. I also visited an island south of Sulawesi to become the fourth person to knowingly lay eyes on the recently-discovered Selayar Leaf-Warbler!

From October to December I went to New Zealand, where through a gracious recommendation from a former Watson and Sewanee grad, I was able to work with the Department of Conservation tracking and radio-tagging Kiwi in the mountains of Fiordland.

On the way back across the pacific at the end of December, I stopped in New Caledonia to find one of the world’s most unusual birds, the rooster-sized Kagu. My final stop was a short trip to Fiji, where I got to see two of the world’s best doves: Golden Dove and Orange Dove.

Then it was back to the US for the Watson Conference, where I got to meet the program coordinators and 20 other young people who had also just completed their Watson year.

About Me

I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. My parents, Rusty and Joanna, started teaching me about birds at a young age, and I quickly became obsessed. The Georgia Youth Birding Competition really got me hooked on birding, and after high school graduation (and 12 years of YBC’s) my younger brother Ewan and I *invested* most of our pooled savings in a birding trip to Ecuador. I studied Ecology and Biodiversity at Sewanee in Tennessee, and graduated in May 2022. I have always loved photography, painting and mapmaking.

Texts which inspired this project:

Last Chance to See, Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine; 1992. Ballantine Books

The Life of Birds, David Attenborough; 1998. BBC

The Complete Encyclopedia of Birds and Bird Migration, Christopher M. Perrins, Jonathan Elphick; 2003. Book Sales Publishing