Maggie has always been fascinated by nature – be it by birds mastering the winds as they fly, ants performing their unnoticed duties, or flowering plants blossoming for the butterflies and bees. Growing up in Livingstone, Zambia’s tourism capital, she was drawn by the mystery of the surrounding habitats and the animals they support. This fascination grew into a desire to pursue a wildlife-related career – firstly to better understand the animals and then to learn how to conserve them.

Maggie attained a BSc in Wildlife Management at Copperbelt University (Zambia) in 2015 and, shortly thereafter, took up a position as Curator of Ornithology at the Livingstone Museum. This has given her a platform to conduct conservation initiatives that aim at managing shared resources between people and animals. Her interest is in the study of birds, and she has spent extended periods conducting fieldwork on birds in various parts of Zambia. Notably, she leads a biannual waterbird census in Livingstone, using waterbirds as indicators of wetland health.

Maggie is specifically interested in bird evolution in response to climate change. As curator at the Livingstone Museum, she oversees a unique historical egg collection of John Colebrook-Robjent, which she used to investigate the evolution of birds’ eggs in response to climate warming for her MSc studies. She completed her MSc in Conservation Biology in 2024 (at the FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology), under the supervision of Claire Spottiswoode, Shannon Conradie, and Nicholas Horrocks. Her thesis, titled “Have birds' eggs become paler as the climate warms?”, found that eggshell luminance has increased over the last 12 years, which is also when climate change has been most severe. This suggests an evolutionary response to increasing temperatures.

Maggie is now pursuing her PhD, researching how bird eggs adapt to a warming world and the implications of this for camouflage and signalling identity, under the supervision of Claire Spottiswoode.

Thesis: Birds’ eggs as camouflage and as signals of identity in a warming world.