My name is Patrick Kirby. I'm a documentary filmmaker based in Maine, and I've spent the last several months filming "The Coalition", an 20-minute documentary about the Horseshoe Crab Recovery Coalition, set for festival release in September 2026.

While making that film I kept running into a bigger story. One that goes further than Delaware Bay.

Migration is the feature documentary I want to make next.

Three things migrate in this story. Horseshoe crabs migrate to spawn on Atlantic beaches every spring, just as they have for 450 million years. Red knots migrate 9,000 miles from Brazil specifically to eat horseshoe crab eggs before continuing to the Arctic. And the medical industry that has quietly used horseshoe crab blood to keep our vaccines and medicines safe for 40 years is now migrating toward a synthetic alternative.

If you've ever had a vaccine, a horseshoe crab probably saved your life. That's not a metaphor, their blue blood contains a compound that has been used to test the safety of virtually every injectable medicine produced since the 1970s. A synthetic alternative was approved by the US Pharmacopeia in November 2024. The transition is beginning.

Migration will follow that transition from every angle. I want to go to Singapore to film the Asian horseshoe crab species and the lab where the synthetic was first developed. I want to go to Brazil to follow the red knots to their wintering grounds. I want to sit with the blood lab workers who have spent careers doing this extraction, and the fishermen whose income depends on a harvest that may soon no longer exist.

This is a story about what happens when something ancient meets something new, and who gets left behind.

This campaign covers production costs for the feature: travel to Singapore and Brazil, equipment, and post-production.

Every dollar gets this story told.

Link to the short "The Coalition" https://filmfreeway.com/projects/4420735