There are those whose lives accumulate significance slowly, the way sediment builds into shoreline. And then there are those whose devotion etches meaning into every year. Shiloh Schulte, a biologist who spent his life chasing birds across hemispheres, belonged to the latter group. He died in the North Slope of Alaska when the helicopter he was using to reach a remote study site crashed. It was a risk he understood—perhaps even accepted—as part of the job. For Shiloh, conservation was never a desk-bound discipline. He was happiest prone in the mud, recording the heartbeat of a whimbrel, or wading through marshes at dawn, checking nests that might otherwise go unnoticed. He had a PhD, but also a practical gift rare among scientists: he could fix an outboard motor, survive an unplanned night on a windswept Arctic islet, and persuade dozens of stakeholders with competing interests to band together for the sake of a shorebird. He was best known for his work on the American Oystercatcher. Once thought to be disappearing from the Eastern Seaboard, the species rebounded by 45% under his watch. He helped orchestrate that recovery through a mix of painstaking fieldwork, applied science, and relationship-building that earned him respect from fishermen, policymakers, and fellow scientists alike. Manomet, the Massachusetts-based nonprofit where he worked for over a decade, gave him the latitude to operate across borders and bureaucracies. He made the most of it. Alaska held a special place in his imagination—it was where, at 18, he first ventured into…This article was originally published on Mongabay