The Portfolio

Making an unseen pathway of lead exposure visible, understandable, and actionable.

The Story

Created for the Montana Raptor Conservation Center, this infographic explains how fragments from lead bullets can become a source of lead exposure for eagles.

MRCC needed an educational piece that could speak to a broad audience—from young visitors learning about raptors to adults who may use lead ammunition for hunting, recreation, or pest control. The design uses a clear visual sequence, approachable illustrations, minimal text, and changes in scale to guide viewers through the process. A magnified cross-section reveals how a lead bullet can fragment on impact, connecting something difficult to see with the potential exposure of a scavenging eagle.

Why It Matters

The goal was to inform rather than overwhelm. The illustration allows the main idea to be understood quickly while providing enough detail for viewers who want to look closer and learn more.

By moving from how lead enters the environment, to how eagles encounter it, to how that risk can be reduced, the infographic gives MRCC a flexible educational tool for communicating with people of different ages, backgrounds, and relationships with ammunition—while keeping the focus on a shared goal: reducing lead exposure in eagles.

Built from plant fibers, lichen, and spider silk, this tiny home is an extraordinary feat of natural engineering.

The Story

This watercolor began with a fascination for one of the smallest and most carefully constructed homes in the natural world: the nest of a ruby-throated hummingbird (Archilochus colubris).

Built entirely by the female, the nest is constructed from soft plant fibers and other fine materials, bound together with spider silk and camouflaged with pieces of lichen. The silk helps hold the nest securely in place while giving it the flexibility to stretch as the chicks grow. From only a few feet away, the finished nest can look less like a nest and more like a natural knot along a branch.

For this piece, I placed the nest on a red oak branch and used watercolor to capture the subtle textures that make it so easy to overlook: overlapping lichens, soft plant fibers, rough bark, and delicate strands of silk wrapped around the nest and branch.

Those nearly invisible threads became one of my favorite details in the painting. They reveal an unexpected connection between species—the work of a spider becoming an essential building material for a hummingbird’s home.

Why It Matters

A hummingbird nest is tiny, but it holds an entire story of adaptation.

Every material serves a purpose. Soft fibers create insulation and structure. Spider silk binds the nest together while allowing it to expand. Lichen helps disguise its surface against the surrounding branch. Together, these materials create a home remarkably suited to protecting two impossibly small eggs and the chicks that emerge from them.

The nest is also a reminder that no species exists entirely on its own. A hummingbird depends not only on flowering plants for food, but on the plants, spiders, and other organisms that provide the materials needed to successfully raise its young.

Hummingbird Home is an attempt to make those small relationships visible—to draw attention to something easily passed by and reveal the remarkable engineering, adaptation, and interconnection hidden within it.

Raptors are among Montana's most visible wildlife ambassadors.

The Story

The Montana Raptor Center does remarkable work. They rehabilitate injured birds, train raptors as permanent educational ambassadors, and sends them into schools and community centers across the state. When they needed to update their public-facing educational materials, they turned to FINCH to create a new identification guide: a tri-fold piece designed to help anyone — birder or beginner — look up and know what they're seeing.

The guide breaks down what defines a raptor, then walks through the distinguishing silhouettes, field markings, and flight patterns of Montana's most commonly observed species. It's designed for the moment you're standing on a trail or in a parking lot, watching something circle overhead, and wanting to know its name.

Why It Matters

Raptors are everywhere in Montana, and most people don't realize it. The red-tailed hawk is one of the most visible birds of prey in Bozeman, a daily presence for anyone who knows where to look. But knowing where to look starts with knowing what you're looking for.

Beyond the joy of identification, raptors are essential. They are one of nature's most effective pest management systems, controlling populations of field mice, snakes, insects, and in some cases songbirds. Their presence is a sign of ecosystem health. Their decline is a warning.

The Montana Raptor Center's educational mission, and this guide, rests on a simple belief that FINCH shares: when people can identify the wildlife around them, they begin to care about it differently.

An entire season of gathering, tucked carefully between the rocks.

The Story

This piece began with a personal fascination and a research paper that sat on my desk for nearly a year before it became an illustration.

After connecting with a graduate researcher who had spent years studying pika behavior, I was able to dive deeper into the species' remarkable seasonal adaptations. From that research emerged a question: how could an illustration communicate an entire ecological process at once?

Unlike many mammals that hibernate or migrate, pikas remain active throughout the winter. During the warmer months, they spend countless hours gathering grasses, wildflowers, and other vegetation — spreading the plants across rocks to dry before storing them in carefully constructed haypiles that sustain them through months of snow and cold.

Rendered in graphite, this illustration follows that seasonal cycle. The composition moves in a gentle arc, guiding the viewer from the abundance of summer gathering to the quiet preparation required for winter survival. Multiple moments unfold within a single frame, revealing a process that is rarely witnessed in its entirety.

Why It Matters

Pikas are small mammals with an outsized ecological story. Living among alpine talus slopes, they influence the plant communities around them through their foraging and haying behavior, while also serving as prey for a variety of mountain predators.

They have also become an important indicator species for understanding the impacts of climate change in high-elevation ecosystems. Adapted to cool temperatures and insulated winter conditions, pikas can be especially sensitive to warming climates and changes in snowpack. Researchers across the American West continue to study how these changes may affect pika populations and the alpine habitats they depend upon.

This illustration is an attempt to make that story visible — to highlight a species whose daily work often goes unnoticed and to foster a deeper appreciation for the intricate relationships that sustain mountain ecosystems.

The Story

This personal project explores a potential trophic cascade being studied in Yellowstone National Park, with beavers at the heart of the story.

Beavers are ecosystem engineers. Where conditions allow them to build dams, they can slow and spread water, trap sediment, raise local water tables, and create ponds and wetlands—physically changing the habitat around them. In Yellowstone, beavers are also closely connected to willow, which provides important food and building material. 

The illustration follows one proposed pathway connecting the reintroduction of wolves to changes farther down the food web: wolves influence elk populations and behavior; reduced browsing may contribute to willow recovery; increased willow can provide better habitat for beavers; and beaver dams can then alter the movement and storage of water, potentially raising local water tables and supporting wetter riparian conditions. 

Four repeating landscape blocks allow that interconnected process to unfold visually, showing how changes among predators, herbivores, plants, beavers, and water might ultimately reshape the same stream corridor.

Why It Matters

The fascinating part of this story is that the cascade may eventually reach an animal capable of changing the physical landscape itself.

But Yellowstone’s story is not as simple as wolves returned, therefore beavers returned. Researchers continue to investigate the roles of wolves, elk, vegetation, groundwater, climate, hydrology, and beavers themselves. The National Park Service explicitly notes that the extent of Yellowstone’s trophic cascade—and the relative importance of the different forces involved—remains an area of ongoing research. 

This illustration makes that proposed chain of relationships visible.