Usually I like days in the field. It gets me out of the basement. Today was cold. Too cold. And wet.

I’ve been struggling with the idea of scientific visual storytelling. How do you make a story ‘pop’ when it’s really just the facts? Perhaps this is the challenge of all science communication. Make it interesting, make it factual, capture imagination.

This is what I came up with. I kept it short. Fish Surgery.

It felt good to have my DSLR in my hands again. This fall has been filled with writing applications for projects I might do one day. It’s nice to just do. I’m heading to Guyana in ten days, for a month full of doing. It will be just what the doctor ordered.

A field technician wades in to retrieve the net.

The bounty. Researches must sort through nets to find Grass Pickerel, a species at risk and the subject of the study.

The tools.

Fish Surgery. Grass Pickerel are outfitted with radio tags for year round monitoring and evaluation.

This is why I’m going.  I’ll be joining Dr. Allan Baker and a team of researches to document the recovery of the Red Knot, a migratory shore bird which journeys each summer from Tierra del Fuego in Argentina to the Arctic, a distance measuring over 15,000 km.  In the late 1990’s, the North American subspecies experienced a population crash, plummeting from 90,000 individuals to a mere 13,000.  The population now hovers around 30,000.  A few good breeding seasons could take the birds off the endangered species list and onto the road to recovery.  But it won’t be easy – the United States has yet to classify the bird as endangered (due to both political and financial reasons,) and fisherman off the coast of Delaware Bay continue to over fish horseshoe crabs, whose eggs are a critical food source for the Red Knot during the annual migration.

The trip is still a few weeks off, but I’ll be documenting the adventure here.  Stay tuned…