Here is a quick little sequence from our ramblings down along the creek this week. The sequence was shot using a Canon 7D and a newly constructed dolly that doubles as a solar panel support. Enjoy

We’ve been goofing around with time lapses on the 7D. Yesterday we tried to predict the appearance of a rainbow, and we missed it, PLUS lightning, only with the framing. On the 7D our wide lenses aren’t so wide. Live and learn!

This is a short web film produced for Montana Audubon addressing the impact oil & gas development has on sage grouse, a species recently warranted by the USFWS as worthy of protection under the Endangered Species Act. This film includes interviews with David Sibley, Dave Naugle, and Amy Cilimburg.

You can view a small version of the film here for faster loading:

This short video is just a cobbling of the dipper footage I shot yesterday on Rattlesnake Creek. Enjoy

This is a single-shot 7D clip from our latest project for the Montana Natural History Center in Missoula, Montana. We spent the day shooting kids from a local elementary school as they explored the river bottoms with MNHC staff to learn about insects, birds, and a few things microscopic. This video project should be posted in full at this site in a few weeks.

This week’s photos capture the extremes of early May in the Northern
Rockies which is characterized simply as a battle between winter and
summer.

This pine grosbeak (Pinicola enucleator) wards off the morning’s freezing
river fog by eating the remains of last years fruit.

This Sylvan hairstreak (Satyrium sylvinus), with its false eye and
antenna on its hind wings, somehow survives the cold nighttime
temperatures.

The end of April brings frigid mornings which usually give way to enough warmth to melt the drifted snow. The first sage thrashers perch atop the tallest sage and fill the dawn with endless melodies. From the obscurity of the low sage comes a mysterious thumping and popping, and we were there in the blind to film the source in 1080p HD with our new Canon 7D, and our batteries completely charged by the sun with our Brunton 14W SolarRoll.

We set up our blind, then went for a walk in the evening sun to catch some of the great light and shapes.

The light from these mornings is always perfect, although much posturing passes before the first light hits these magnificent birds and their bizarre display.

The first poppings came before dawn, around 5:45. It was a good thing we were in the blind and quiet by 3:00 a.m. or we we have scared them all off. These birds make a living by detecting the slightest odd movement.

Bingo! After a four hour wait, birds came within 20 feet of the blind, posturing to each other, completely unaware of our presence.

The footage we captured will go into our next production for Montana Audubon.

Far-roaming animals such as grizzlies, lynx, and wolverine almost inevitably run into obstacles that impede large movements such as residential development, extractive industrial activity, and other anthropogenic gaps in habitat.

One impediment to large landscape movements is the incredibly dense web of roads that blankets the landscape. Of those species that are not turned back outright from fear, the remainder set foot on the pavement, the potential consequences of which they likely do not understand.

While traveling to film sage grouse in late April, we at Conservation Media spotted wolverine tracks crossing a highway in SW Montana, and we felt compelled to document it. Below is a selection of photos we took. Feel free to use these photos however you’d like, but please include appropriate credit. We also have 1080p video footage.

To learn more about landscape-scale connectivity and what you can do to help, go to Witness for Wildlife.

Conservation Media completed this film for Sonoran Institute. It addresses the loss of one of the West’s most valuable assets, open space, which serves as a community’s agricultural base and wildlife habitat. Contact Sonoran Institute (www.SonoranInstitute.org) to see how you can become involved.

The following map shows the extent of Conservation Media’s reach in its first three months of online existence. We are quite pleased with ourselves, to be honest. Each red dot on the map below shows not individuals but cities where people are logging on to consume Conservation Media’s content.

You can see that our circle of influence is focused in the Northern Rockies, followed by the US, then North America, and then it fades into the global background, so we are hitting our target exactly as planned.

This valuable input is also a great reference point for us to begin developing performance metrics so that we can actually bring quantitative value into our conservation effort.