Bird migration is one of the world's truly unifying global phenomena. The ecological needs of birdlife prompt vast journeys across a uniquely patterned and seasonal planet, stitching the natural world together in dramatic and unforgettable ways. Raptors, more than any other family of birds, exhibit massive, visible, and far-ranging migrations, while their diversity and abundance in many places are critical indicators of the health of ecosystems. The Watson Fellowship granted me the opportunity to study along these raptorial flyways–the geographical corridors that raptors navigate and depend upon during the spring and fall migration. At each step of the project I asked the question: How can these global flyways be studied and explored as entry points into the rich and dynamic place-specific interrelations of people, landscape, and nature?

While birds and the scientific inquiry into their ecology and conservation was the framework for the fundamental timing and sites of my project, the root of my experience came from my participation alongside the people I lived and worked with. Through committed involvement in regional projects on raptor conservation and migration monitoring balanced with periods of independent field research among indigenous communities, I forged a year full of intensely practical on-the-ground experience.

I spent research time in 8 countries, between the western Mediterranean region, Latin America, and Asia. I ventured to Spain (Andalucía and Gibraltar), Morocco (Central Atlas), Costa Rica (Talamánca), Panamá (Canal Zone), México (State of Chihuáhua), India (Sikkim), the Kingdom of Bhutan (Paro, Thimphu, Punakha, Wagdue Phodrang, and Tongsa Dzongkhags), and Mongolia (Central Steppe). Driven at every step by my personal fascination with and attention to birds of prey and their far-ranging peregrinations, I saw the world through this lens.

The chronology of my fellowship year fit closely to the geography and phenology of raptors, whereby in the fall and spring I engaged as a volunteer in studies of migration and in the winter and summer I participated in projects involving the conservation of endangered species in key wintering and breeding grounds.

I began the year in Spain during the peak of fall migration for European raptors. As part of one of the longest standing nature monitoring programs in the world, I worked with Spanish university students, professional coordinators from member-supported ornithological organizations, and activist Gibraltarian citizens to count the passage of soaring birds (all raptors including storks) over the 14 km stretch of water across the Straight of Gibraltar, dividing Spain from Morocco, or peninsular Europe from North Africa. It was an ideal location to begin my year as I immediately began to see the region as critical global crossroads for fascinating and interconnected phenomena: the region is a modern day meeting place between islam and christianity, a bottleneck for global shipping routes and cetacean migration, one of the windiest places on earth inviting wind and kite surfing tourism as well as large scale wind power development, and a critical and controversial spot for the immigration of african refugees to europe.

I journeyed next into Morocco's High Atlas mountains with a group of avid Catalán ornithologists from Barcelona for two weeks to scout for rare North African species of desert thrushes and high altitude raptors and vultures, several of which I was later able to study in depth in Asia. We stayed in Berber villages, learned the local names and local stories for the unique highland birds, and participated in endless drum circles in communities along the way.

After departing Morocco in October, I arrived to the utmost peak of fall migration in Central America and began an intense survey period at a remote hawk-watch site recently discovered in the coastal rain-forest of southeastern Costa Rica, and administered within an indigenous reserve by a BriBri indian family and several young Costa Rican biologists. During the fall of 2002 in which I participated the site tallied the third largest total count of migratory raptors worldwide, gaining significant international attention.

For the winter months I continued south to Panamá to work at a highly technical project run by the international NGO Fondo Perégrino, working to captive-breed and reintroduce raptors back into their native forests. I took the role of a hack site attendant (essentially a substitute parent to the fledglings) to the reintroduction of the Harpy Eagle (Aguila arpia), a critically endangered flagship species for Central and South American tropical forest protection.

At the culmination of the winter season I lived in a Tarahumara (Rarámuri) Indian community, one of several that survive in resistance to outside pressures of tourism and religion by inhabiting the remote canyons systems of the Pacific slope of the Sierra Madre in Northwestern México. With the support of the Sirra Madre Alliance and Fuerza Ambiental, a old growth forest protection and human rights organization, respectively, I worked as an ornithologist with a small team of activist anthropologists, biologists, lawyers, and tribal leaders to document wintering migratory birdlife, and indigenous knowledge of it, as a way to help legitimize native land claims and help protect and preserve one of the last unexploited regions of the Sierra Madre Occidental from illegal logging and the corruptive forces of marijuana and opium production.

As the spring season arrived to the far western canyons of the Sierra Madre I departed on an independent field excursion to survey for migrant songbirds winging north up and along the riparian bottoms of the deepest north-south running canyons. As hypothesized, I found extraordinary congregations of migrants stopping over before departing on their long journey across the Sonoran desert to their breeding grounds in the U.S. and Canada. The wide diversity of neotropical migrants were depending primarily on a single species of tree locally known as guámuchil (Pithecellobium dulce), cultivated passively along river sand-banks by the semi-nomadic Rarámuri.

I left Mexico in the late spring to catch the migration season and vulture nesting season in the far Eastern Himalaya. Between Sikkim and Bhutan, I spent a month and a half on assignment from the Peregrine Fund searching refuse dumps, landfills, and burial sites for individuals of the recently collapsed populations of Indian vultures and trekked to several high passes to document the abundance of the unaffected raptor species such as the Golden Eagle, Lammergeier, and Himalayan Griffon. In Bhutan I also conducted interviews with Yak herding families about the changing ecology of vultures, domestic ungulates, and snow leopards in highland communities.

During the culminating summer season I worked as an assistant to a small team of Mongolian researchers and university students, participating in the first Mongolian project studying the Monk Vulture, one of the largest and least known vultures of the world. We spent the majority of our time in the vast central Mongolian steppe and adjoining rocky mountain ranges radio tracking the movements of marked vultures and living with gracious nomadic families that supported our research and its goals in their community. The project was a total breakthrough in how successfully and joyously the leader of the project, Nyambar Batbayar, a US trained raptor biologist, integrated his field research into the lives of local nomadic families.

One of the greatest overall lessons that emerged from being immersed in these places and projects was the extent to which, and nuances of how the integrity of the people who live closely within their native landscapes are at as great a threat as any of the migratory species of birds that travel through them, and that their future is linked. I worked in places where the economy and environment are so closely related that only in helping understand and connect the two can either benefit. Ranging from communities committed to exploiting local natural resources for commercial gain to those whose livelihood depends inextricably on the care of wild biodiversity, I learned the ways that people in 8 unique countries are sustained by a close connection to the natural world and how the emerging conservation problems of birds and other wildlife in their regions are symptoms of greater overall forces that also threaten their culture and communities.

At root the great forces are those of the economic globalization, or the forcing open of free trade, globalization of markets, commodification of local resources, and debt-induced measures leading to poverty and exploitation. In particular, I saw first hand the pressures coming upon remote and previously inaccessible regions like the Moroccan High Atlas, rural Caribbean Costa Rica, NW Mexico, Bhutan, and Mongolia from new forms of resource extraction, tourism, and the privatization of land. And in places like Panama and Spain I saw how the legacies of imperialism and the development of global shipping routes have marginalized local economies and local identity. I also saw first hand the day to day struggles of individual people I lived with whose lives completely relied on the health of their local ecosystems.

Of particular interest in my project was the role of scientific researchers in the lives of local people. I experienced how researchers working in the field to conserve the diversity of species in threatened, internationally critical regions are also at every step beginning to work more closely with the local people and relying more on their place-based knowledge.

I knew before I left on this journey that ornithologists are to credit for some of the most interesting work bringing together the common destinies and shared need to protect local people and local species. My experience as a whole clarified how, in the best circumstances, field researchers can play a critical role as a kind of mediator between the natural world and human economies at local scales. We are called to take a wide-angle perspective—finding wise interdisciplinary ways to approach environmental problems while maintaining a keen attention to the knowledge of locals—motivated ultimately by the knowledge of the global scale threats to culture and environment. The Watson Fellowship granted me the privileged position to observe the points when field biology became as much humanitarian work as it was about hard numbers.

But for every bright spot there were many challenges, some irreconcilable and costly, that I faced with fellow researchers throughout the year. I learned that, even if we are prepared to see our research role as less of an end in itself and more of a means to use as an open-minded mediator, we cannot forget the sensitivities and careful attitude needed to be truly wise in any position of authority. Friendship, trust, and humility are perhaps the most critical things to not lose track of, no matter how scientific or “cut and dry” the solutions might appear to a conservation problem from the perspective of a researcher. A solid and enduring rapport between people must be sought and a trust built upon whether the objectives of science, in its quest for detailed ecological knowledge, and the needs of local people, can be mutual. And a certain humility is especially essential because foreign (like me) or even regional researchers (like those I worked with) are not often immediately welcome into people’s lives, and especially not our resolutions or determinations if they do not involve and empower the people they will most critically affect.

How can we be humble enough to remember that as researchers we are never local – we come from a privileged background of education. I was reminded at many points about how easy it is to fail to gain people’s trust and confidence by forgetting that we are actually working with the people who have the real experience. All we can do is bring our capacity for seeing the long term health of the environment and people’s lives as interconnected and to carry with confidence the goal of reconciling ways to protect the whole—the integrity of people and place.