Around the world in search of birds: An interview with Stephanie Bartlett and Paulo Ditzel

IBCP
May 28
18 min read

Updated: May 29

28 May, 2026

By David Goodman

Paulo Ditzel and Stephanie Bartlett banding Blue-billed Malimbes (Malimbus nitens) in Fazao-Malfakassa National Park, Togo. Photo courtesy of Stephanie Bartlett and Paulo Ditzel.

Meet Stephanie Bartlett and Paulo Ditzel, a couple and two field researchers working with IBCP in West Africa, after recently working together on the Cape May Songbird Stopover Project in New Jersey, USA. Stephanie, originally from California, has spent years conducting field work across America. She’s worked everywhere from California's Sierra Nevada to Panama, with a notable two-year stint studying Mariana Crows on the remote Pacific island of Rota. Paulo, who studied in Germany and is originally from Brazil, has pursued avian research across four continents, including the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Australia. Both are world-class artists, Stephanie a silversmith focused on translating the natural world into jewelry, and Paulo, an exceptionally talented illustrator. Here’s my conversation with them! Note: In some cases, their responses have been edited for clarity and may combine answers from different parts of the conversation.

An African Crake (Crex egregia) peeks out between ferns in Togo, West Africa. Photo by Stephanie Bartlett.

Finding Their Way to Birds

How did you first become interested in birds and conservation?

Stephanie:

I’ve been curious about the natural world, and especially birds, for as long as I can remember. I was homeschooled until I was 9 years old, and as a result I spent a lot of time outdoors and had all these encounters with wildlife. I remember attending a summer camp at a rehabilitation education center and that experience just stuck with me. The love and interest for animals was always there.

For a good chunk of my late teens, I wanted to be a vet. I started volunteering at the Portland Audubon Society’s rehabilitation clinic that focused mainly on songbirds and raptors, and that’s when I discovered an interest that was more closely aligned with conservation, rather than medicine. I was able to see all these birds up close, and it was incredible. You’re suddenly so intimately close to wildlife you usually only ever get to see from a distance. That was huge for me, it put a lot in perspective.

An American Kestrel (Falco sparverius) named Ted, who successfully graduated from a wildlife rehabilitation clinic, meets with Girl Scouts courtesy of his friend Deb Miller. Photo by Nico Arcilla.

While in college I took an ornithology class and realized there were all these other ways to be involved with wildlife. Veterinary medicine just felt kind of sterile for me. What I really wanted was to be out there in the field.

So, I made this big leap—I dropped out during my last semester of college to take a job with the Institute for Bird Populations conducting point counts in the Sierra Nevada. And once I did that, I was hooked. I did end up going back and finishing school, but after that first position, I knew that I belonged in the field.

Stephanie Bartlett holds a Rough-legged Hawk (Buteo lagopus) in California. Photo courtesy of Stephanie Bartlett.

Paulo: My transition to birds was way more abrupt. I graduated high school still thinking I was going to go into art. After I graduated, I decided to take at least a semester of college in Brazil before going to study in Germany. I chose biology because I was like, "Oh, biology seems fun too, and I'll take a look." But I quickly found my love for the natural world there. In that one semester, I took like half the courses needed for the whole bachelor’s degree. Then I met someone who worked at the museum in taxidermy, so I started doing an internship at the museum, stuffing birds. I remember in my first week, I was looking at all these birds like, "There's no way there’s all of these different species." I was really hooked after that.

So I went to Germany for school and did biology. At some point there was this extracurricular where an older German teacher wanted to take people into the field. I went along and I was like, "Whoa, this is actually really fun." And when I bought my first pair of binoculars, there was no way back. Eventually, I decided I couldn't stay in Germany, because there were just not enough birds there. Then I went to Hawai’i and I couldn't stay in Hawai’i because there were not enough birds there. It's just been world hopping after that.

A Yellowhammer (Emberiza citrinella) in Germany. Photo by Nico Arcilla.

Meeting in Panama

How did you two end up working in Panama?

Stephanie: Panama was where Paulo and I met! He was working on a project focusing on antbirds and I was working for a grad student studying Black-crowned Antshrikes along pipeline road, a major birding hotspot! Both positions involved spending most days hiking around the jungle and observing birds, target netting, color-banding etc. We also got to experience some incredible Neotropical birding together. The biodiversity in Panama is just incredible—you're seeing species you've never encountered before, hearing soundscapes that are completely different from anywhere else.

Paulo: We were working witharmy-ant swarms, which is this incredible phenomenon that most people don't know about. There are these species of army ant (Ecitonsp.) that make carpets like 20 meters wide of ants on the forest floor. They walk through the forest and just kill everything they can and bring it back to their nest, which isn't really a nest—it's just a collective of ants holding hands to make a structure. There are all these birds that exclusively feed on insects that run away from these ants. Some birds will not feed if they're not at an ant swarm. We were working with these antbirds that follow them around.

Lesson's Motmot (Momotus lessonii) is one of hundreds of bird species known to associate with army ant swarms as a hunting strategy. Photo by Nico Arcilla.

Note: Readers are warned that the following anecdote from Central America is about Paulo’s rather graphic encounter with a parasitic insect, and is not for the squeamish. I’ve chosen to include it because it is a classic story from the field, but feel free to skip to the “Cape May” section if this doesn’t sound like something you want to know more about!

Paulo: In Panama there's an insect called a “botfly”. It basically lays eggs inside you, the larva hatches, and starts eating your flesh alive. While I worked there, I had one of those on my leg. But there's a similar, lesser known, insect called the sheep botfly (Oestrus ovis). It operates under the same principle, except it lays its eggs in the eyes of sheep. It doesn't really affect humans: there's only been a couple hundred recorded cases of sheep botflies affecting humans. And I was one of them.

This was in South Africa, and when I went to the hospital, I had over 15 larvae inside my right eye. I was bleeding out of my nose, my eye was swollen and completely red. My vision was blurry for two full weeks, and at one point it wasn’t clear if I was going to lose my eye or not. There was one day at the hospital where the doctor didn't know what to do because he had never seen anything like it. There's no medical procedure to follow. In the end, I had to take sheep medicine because there wasn't anything for humans. It was very traumatic at the time, but I can laugh about it now!

Paulo Ditzel holds a Keel-billed Toucan (Ramphastos sulfuratus) in Panama. Photo courtesy of Paulo Ditzel.

Cape May: A Migration Funnel

Tell me about what you were doing in Cape May—why is the banding happening there?

Stephanie: I am working for the Cape May Songbird Stopover Project, which started in 2018. Last year I was the banding technician, and this year I'm one of the lead banders. Cape May is a peninsula that acts as a funnel, where birds coming down the coast on their migration south often need to stop and fuel up before they continue over Delaware Bay, so we get very large numbers of migrants. Our project focuses mainly on banding, but we also attach transmitters to some species to track their stopover usage and migration more in depth. It is incredible to witness the whole spectrum of migration, starting with the early neotropical migrants (my favorite) and slowly transitioning over the course of the season. Once the Yellow-rumped Warblers arrive, we can easily band over 300 birds in a day! Cape May attracts a lot of visitors, including international ones. There are a lot of opportunities for education and outreach at the banding station, which I think is so crucial! Seeing a bird in the hand can truly be life changing.

A female Baltimore Oriole (Icterus galbula), a neotropical migrant, banded on migration. Photo by Nico Arcilla.

The songbird banding station is not the only research being conducted in Cape May, there are folks working with monarch butterflies, counting migrating seabirds, counting migrating songbirds, trapping and banding raptors. There are also dedicated interpretive naturalists working to keep the public excited and involved. These datasets go back decades and because of this you can see long-term trends in population size, migration timing, etc. It’s incredibly valuable in our rapidly changing world! Migration is thoroughly documented here each spring and fall and I hope it stays that way.

A male Northern Cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis) banded on migration. Photo by Nico Arcilla.

Stephanie: From the US to Panama to the Pacific

Tell me about your work in California and Oregon.

Stephanie: I spent a few seasons working for IBP (the Institute for Bird Populations), this included conducting point counts in the backcountry of the Sierra Nevada and surveying for Black-backed Woodpeckers close to the southernmost extent of their range. I also spent a season monitoring San Clemente Island Bell's Sparrows. This project focused on nest searching and territory mapping. One of my favorite stints of fieldwork was learning to trap and count migrating raptors on a small butte near Mount Hood, Oregon. A huge highlight from that season was trapping a juvenile bald eagle. It was one of the very few bald eagles ever captured at a hawkwatch station because they're notoriously difficult to catch. That was an incredible season that introduced me to the magic of migration.

A young (three-year-old) Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) in flight; at age four, Bald Eagles molt into adult plumage, with white heads and tails. Photo by Nico Arcilla.

I learned to band raptors before I learned to band songbirds, which is unusual. I’ve gone from banding very large birds to very tiny birds. I recently learned to band hummingbirds in Idaho and this season I've been banding the Ruby-throated Hummingbirds that have been migrating through Cape May. It’s very exciting to have acquired the skills to band large diurnal raptors and also the smallest hummingbird in North America (Calliope Hummingbird).

Stephanie holds a newly banded Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis).

Before working in Cape May, I was introduced to songbird banding in North Carolina at what might be the highest elevation banding station east of the Mississippi. It's right along the Appalachian Trail, up around 5,000 feet. You get all these cold-adapted boreal species like Tennessee Warblers, Bay-breasted Warblers, Cape May Warblers, tons of Swainson's Thrush, and even a few Gray-cheeked Thrush. A completely different species composition than what we are banding in Cape May. It was really interesting to be up there for a few years and then to come down here—it's a totally different set of species.

Gray-cheeked Thrush (Catharus minimus) banded on migration. Photo by Nico Arcilla.

You spent two years with Mariana Crows in the Pacific. What exactly were you studying?

Stephanie: We were monitoring the Mariana Crow population throughout the island of Rota, which is northeast of Guam. There are only a couple of hundred crows left on the island, and almost every bird is uniquely color-banded. They were completely extirpated from Guam in the 80s. We would spend our working hours searching for their nests, keeping tabs on every pair on the island, banding and tagging the birds as needed. We would attach transmitters to the recently fledged birds and extensively track their movements. You become intimately entangled in the lives of these crows. There was often drama among neighboring pairs, interesting foraging observations (some of the crows could successfully eat rather large hermit crabs without injury), and nests we would miss since the crows are exceptionally smart. Once, a male stole a fledgling from a pair in a nearby territory and raised it with his mate. It was amazing to work with a species that is so intelligent, but also heartbreaking to know their population was once thriving on multiple islands. These birds are facing a lot of threats including feral cats, coconut crabs, habitat degradation, etc.

A juvenile Mariana Crow (Corvus kubaryi). Photo courtesy of Stephanie Bartlett.

I was also working in conjunction with the San Diego Zoo on a captive rear and release project for the Mariana crows. We were pulling eggs from the first nest of the season from pairs that we knew were going to be successful later, raising these birds in captivity, teaching them to forage and hunt on their own, and then they'd be released after about two years. These captive-bred and released pairs are now just starting to breed, a few of them with wild birds, which is really cool. Hopefully that's going to bolster the population.

A Mariana Crow. Photo courtesy of Stephanie Bartlett.

Rota is a 2 x 10-mile island in the middle of the Pacific. That’s pretty small! What was it like living there?

Stephanie: It was very quiet. Your typical day was going out and monitoring the crows until it was too hot to be in the field. Our off time involved a lot of board games, spearfishing, and I started obsessively teaching myself to metalsmith. I would work six or seven hours in the field and then I would dive into five hours of metalsmithing.

Stephanie holds a young banded Mariana Crow. Photo courtesy of Stephanie Bartlett.

You do have a tight-knit community, mostly folks working with wildlife. Imagine lots of group dinners on the beach and craft nights. Rota is very remote, and it’s easy to feel very isolated.

You have to stay curious and have something you're passionate about outside of work—a hobby, whatever it is—to keep yourself busy. I saw a lot of folks struggling out there. It's not for everyone. I think spending two years out there was enough for me, but I often miss the lifestyle, the simplicity, and of course, the crows.

A view of Rota and the Pacific Ocean. Photo by Stephanie Bartlett.

How did you teach yourself metalsmithing on a remote Pacific island?

Stephanie: I had been interested in metalsmithing prior to living on Rota and I had a little bit of experience with the craft. I had a huge list of tools I needed to bring with me so I crammed them all into a large suitcase. This included a torch, a rock tumbler, all sorts of hammers and other tools. Shipping silversmithing materials to Rota would sometimes take up to a month, so I had to make do with what I brought. In my off time I would spend hours playing around with different techniques in an apartment without AC. Imagine torching metal in 90-plus percent humidity, phew! It was exhausting and wonderful at the same time. I love being able to share the natural world from a different perspective with folks, it’s amazing! My favorite pieces to craft are often commissions celebrating a PhD defense or something along those lines. Getting to turn a study species into wearable art is just so rewarding!

Bird art by Stephanie Bartlett. Photo courtesy of Stephanie Bartlett.

Metalsmithing was both a hobby and a means of income between field stints. Money is a huge stress for a lot of people since our work is so seasonal. I needed a way of taking inspiration from field work and turning it into art while also supporting myself. It has helped to be able to focus on work that I am truly excited about and not have to worry as much about the pay. I spent a lot of my early career taking jobs based on what I could afford to do, and I didn't want to do that anymore.

Paulo: Across Four Continents

Paulo, you said that you thought about going into art before you found biology. Tell me about your illustrations. When did you become interested in that kind of art, and how did you get so good?

Paulo: I had never drawn in my life properly until 10th grade in high school. Then I had one summer where all my friends were away, so I was just bored and started drawing whatever. But 2017 is when I really started, when our high school art teacher gave us a challenge to draw something, anything, every day for a month. I took that challenge really seriously, mostly because I really liked that moment of peace that drawing brought to me, and ended up drawing for 300 days straight.

White-barred Piculet (Picumnus cirratus) drawing by Paulo. Photo courtesy of Paulo Ditzel.

I was born and raised in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. It's one of the busiest cities in the world. It's just chaos everywhere on the streets. As a kid you can't go out, there's no parks, so you're kind of locked inside most of the time. Drawing was a way of escaping for me, and I did it as much as I could. I think ever since then I've been constantly drawing. What people don't see is that behind the one painting I share, there's a hundred drawings that I don't show to anyone. There are mountains and mountains of notebooks at home of very bad quality stuff. I think the obsession reached a new level when I was in university — moving to a new city and not knowing anyone and not having any friends. Drawing was a familiar comfort.

In the past few years, I kind of tumbled into this fine art bird medium, which I always thought was way too far outside my wheelhouse. But I eventually realized I had the base skills, and I could do it. It's satisfying. What really got me going was the response that people gave. People tell me, "Oh my gosh, I can see the birds—the vibe that the bird has in the field, I can see it in your drawing." I was like, "Oh, thank you. I spent a long time looking at these birds myself and I tried capturing precisely that."

A view of Rio de Janeiro with the statue of Christ the Redeemer in the center. Photo by Rafael Rabello de Barros, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

I still struggle sometimes because I'm not super patient. There are people that can sit on a drawing for a month and work twelve hours a day on it. If I don't finish a drawing in two days, I'm done with it, and I cannot sit down for more than two hours. That's been a limiting factor for making full pieces so far, but I can muster up the courage to invest more time in some pieces if I can see that it'll be satisfying in the end. If I'm obsessed with something, drawing it really helps.

Paulo, tell me about the bird tattoos on your left arm. I understand each different species represents either a bird you’ve worked with in the field, or a place where you’ve spent a lot of time. Let’s start with the Common Swift Tattoo. What does that represent?

Paulo: The Common Swift represents my time in Undergrad in Germany. I've never worked intimately with them, but I did volunteer to check their nest boxes in Berlin for two years.

Germany is hard for Brazilians because compared to Brazil, it can seem cold and gray. In winter you'll see the sun twice in six months, but the summer is just such a relief. It's incredible. And Common Swifts are summer migrants. They represent the change in the weather. Being from the tropics, I had never experienced this, but the sun can set at 10 PM in Germany around June. That’s about when the Common Swifts are breeding. So, every night at 10 PM, just before sunset, the Common Swifts are throwing screaming parties through the streets of Germany. They'll just scream for an hour and it's such an incredible experience.

Common Swift (Apus apus) in flight. Photo by Alexis Lours, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

I associate the sounds swifts make with the joy and release of welcoming summer. Everyone's in a great mood. Everyone's just enjoying life. It's really beautiful. I had my little field book and I had marked down every year the first swift I saw for four years in a row. Three years in a row it was the same day in April. In winter you're sad for so long, but then that one bird comes and it's like a breath of fresh air. It's like, "We are here, summer is coming."

Tell me about the 'Apapane tattoo from Hawai’i.

'Apapane in Haleakala National Park, Hawai’i. Photo by MFBRP, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Paulo: I went to Hawai’i for graduate school. From Germany, I sent out cold emails to professors around the world. My eventual advisor in Hawai’i responded and said, "If you want to come over, we can work on a project. I've got plenty of ideas." But I had no conception of what we were going to do -- he had said “you need to know these birds before coming up with a thesis idea.”

Paulo conducting a bird survey in Hawai’i. Photo courtesy of Paulo Ditzel.

Tell me about the 'Apapane tattoo from Hawai’i.

So I went to Hawai’i. It took me a few months to find my idea. Essentially, if you’re in a native forest during the breeding season, it's a cacophony of 'Apapane song. And their songs are super variable. I was noticing that if you were in different spots in the forest, the song would sound completely different. Even half a mile could produce a completely different set of 'Apapane songs.

Paulo recording 'Apapane songs. Photo of Paulo Ditzel.

I went on to launch my own little case study on that. It turned out I was right: they did have something akin to micro-geographic dialects. They have a crazy shift in what their songs are composed of in distances that the birds easily cross, which is very unusual. I managed to get a fun study out of it, and it's now in review for publication.

What about the Variegated Fairy-wren tattoo from your work in Australia?

Variegated Fairy-wren (Malurus lamberti) in Australia. Photo by Glen Fergus, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.

Paulo: Australia was when I truly delved into international field work through a project with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. This is a long-term monitoring project with fairy-wrens and their breeding. They have a whole banded population in this one section of preserved forest that they’ve been following for years. My job was to be the technician on site to find the birds, see who's nesting with whom, find their nests, and so on—that was the bread and butter of the work. We also had to catch the birds, band them, and generally monitor their breeding cycle.

Paulo with a newly banded Variegated Fairy-wren nestling in Australia. Photo courtesy of Paulo Ditzel.

Even though we were somewhat close to a big city, it was just the five of us in the crew living in a little field house. We were basically by ourselves for six months. We lived and breathed for Variegated Fairy-wrens. Straight after that, I went to Panama where I worked with antbirds and met Stephanie. Then straight after that, I got a job in South Africa.

That’s where your Sociable Weaver tattoo comes from?

Yeah! That job was the odd one out because in South Africa I was the field manager. So, I wasn't just doing the monitoring, I was also overseeing all the activities in the field. We were living in this little house, literally in the middle of the desert. It was just a tiny little oasis of trees with nothing around it. I had a million jobs, monitoring, supervising, planning. Even whenever the car broke down, I had to be the one to fix it. Those were the most intense days of my life. I was getting up at six and working until 11 PM seven days a week, because even on your days off, you had to do something.

Banded Sociable Weaver (Philetairus socius) in South Africa. Photo by Paulo Ditzel.

Advice for Aspiring Field Researchers

What advice would you give to someone looking to do seasonal fieldwork?

Stephanie: Something that I'm glad that I did early in my career was cast a wide net. It helped me discover what I was interested in. For example, I did a whole season of wetland monitoring in the backcountry of the Sierra Nevada, and while it was very fun and backpacking intensive, I was constantly distracted by the birds while I was trying to identify different mosses and grasses to species. I very quickly realized I'm not as interested in that type of work. It’s important to explore early on because you don't know what could draw your curiosity until you try it.

Part of my personal exploration was volunteering on a ton of different projects. I know that's hard and oftentimes it would only be a day or two (because I couldn't afford to go out for weeks), but that was also very eye-opening for me. It helped me figure out where I wanted to be in the field. It's also a great way to meet folks doing work that you find interesting!

Conducting bird surveys in the Sierra Nevada. Photo courtesy of Stephanie Bartlett.

Paulo: Often how much you enjoy field work depends on your mindset. The same job can be amazing or awful depending on variables that are completely outside of your control—your crew, the weather, the season that the birds are having. You have to fully commit to what you're doing. There are people that maybe don't enjoy the work, or don't want to be involved with the crew, and they end up ostracizing themselves. If you start doing the work begrudgingly, or start not wanting to hang out with your crew, you’re less likely to enjoy your time. Remember: It's incredibly ephemeral. After five months it often feels like you've only been there for a couple weeks. Be open to experiencing everything that you can. Be open to everything that people suggest—go do something, go to a place nearby. I think those are the best experiences you can have.

Stephanie: You have to find what excites you. What are you waking up at 4:30 in the morning for and jumping out of bed? For me, it's getting to be up close and personal with birds during their incredible migration. I don't even need an alarm. What is going to get you up in the morning and keep you sane and excited and curious?

Paulo: Don't do it just because you want to have done it. I've heard many people say: "I just want to say that I did that." No, you should want to do the actual thing.

Stephanie Bartlett and Paulo Ditzel are currently doing the actual thing in West Africa with IBCP. A summary of some of their work in Togo can be found here. Stephanie's metalsmithing work can be found at @hawkandanvil, and Paulo's bird illustrations are available at @pauloditzel.