I was an artist long before I was a photographer. I was also a birdwatcher long before I was a photographer, and it was only natural for the two to come together. As life got busier with university, research, and photography, that initial spark got pushed to the side. Over the past year I’ve been straying back towards it as I get more involved with telling stories about my work. I can’t photograph a lot of what I do, and creating artwork gives me the opportunity to tell stories in a different way. On my desk in the office there is a sketchbook that gets pulled out whenever I need to mock-up a diagram, or to just draw when my eyes are tired of reading scientific papers.

In lockdown, with all of my fieldwork cancelled for the foreseeable future, I’ve been using my free time to re-explore my old hobbies. From re-stringing guitars to pulling out the watercolours, it’s been a nice change of pace. I’ve decided that I can make time for these things that got pushed aside when work swallowed all of my time – when we return to our new and different normal, I’m going to keep making time for them. Just like being in wild places, these activities help still my mind, which I had forgotten.

Chris and I have been challenging each other to draw, to scrape the rust off our skills and get back to exercising our creativity. We started with garden birds, and then dove straight into seabird scenes (of course). It’s been a lot of fun so far!